‘Revolting’: Senate Panel Adds Another $45 Billion to Biden’s Military Budget

Progressives responded with disgust after the Senate Armed Services Committee voted Thursday to tack an additional $45 billion on top of President Joe Biden’s already massive military spending request, bringing the total proposed budget for the coming fiscal year to a staggering $857.6 billion.

The Biden administration’s March request for $813 billion in military spending for Fiscal Year 2023 represented a $31 billion increase over the current level of $782 billion, which is already unprecedented.

During its closed-door markup of the National Defense Authorization Act this week, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved a bill with a topline budget of $847 billion—$817 billion of which is earmarked for the Pentagon. Roughly $10 billion of national military spending falls outside the Senate panel’s jurisdiction. The House is expected to make its own push to further boost military spending for the next fiscal year.

William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, called the Senate panel’s decision “misguided.”

“The administration’s proposal is already higher than spending at the peaks of the Korean and Vietnam Wars and over $100 billion more than at the height of the Cold War,” Hartung said in a statement. “Throwing more money at the Pentagon will not make us safer—it will just divert funds from addressing other urgent challenges like pandemics and climate change that put millions of Americans at risk.”

“If Congress truly wants to keep people safe, they must start by rejecting this increase and investing taxpayer dollars in human wellbeing, instead,” Tori Bateman, policy advocacy coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee, said in a statement.

Although a majority of U.S. voters are opposed to military spending in excess of $800 billion, earlier efforts to slash the Pentagon’s budget have failed to gain enough support to pass the House or Senate thanks in part to lawmakers who receive significant amounts of campaign cash from the weapons industry, which benefits from constantly ballooning expenditures.

Roughly 55% of all Pentagon spending went to private sector military contractors from FY 2002 to FY 2021, according to Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute. “If this privatization of funds rate over the last 20 years holds,” Semler wrote in December, arms dealers will gobble up an estimated $407 billion in public money in FY 2022.

Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen—a progressive advocacy group that is pushing the U.S. to ramp up vaccine manufacturing and inoculate the world against Covid-19 with an investment of just $25 billion, or roughly 3% of the nation’s annual military budget—said that “the Senate Armed Services Committee’s choice to defy both the president and public opinion and flood the Pentagon with more money is outrageous.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org, written by Kenny Stancil.