Pentagon Spending

In a new study, Salih Booker of the Center for International Policy and Diana Ohlbaum of the Friends Committee on National Legislation explain how the current, militarized U.S. approach to “national security” perpetuates racism and causes immense harm to people of color at home and abroad.

In this interview, I asked Randall about efforts to cut (or at least reduce the rate of growth of) the United States defense budget, which exceeds $750 billion annually, even though other challenges to national security—climate change and pandemic disease, to name just two—loom large.

On Sept. 1, members of the House Armed Services Committee voted 42-17 to boost the Pentagon budget by $23.9 billion above the president’s original request, bringing total Pentagon spending to $740 billion.

If deterrence is synonymous with dominance, no amount of military spending will ever be enough.

In a meeting closed to the public, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved a bill adding a massive $25 billion to President Joe Biden’s already bloated Pentagon budget request.

General Secretary Diane Randall called on appropriators to cut unnecessary defense spending, improve transparency, and reorient the U.S. national budget towards peace and justice.

In this era of racial reckoning, national security policy and defense budgets cannot be exempt from the scrutiny of their effects on communities of color.

On April 9, President Biden officially sent to Congress what is known as the “skinny budget” – a 58-page summary of a much larger and more detailed budget proposal to be submitted later this spring. The skinny budget contains only the “top-lines,” or total request levels, for each category of spending, with minimal details about how the funds will be allocated among specific programs. We found a lot to love about the proposal, even in its skeleton form.

Early in 2017, in the first months of the Trump administration, Congress increased Pentagon spending by $15 billion over the levels of the outgoing Obama administration. The total—$634 billion— was more in inflation-adjusted terms than the United States spent at the height of the Vietnam War.

There are some things that can’t be put back in the box. And others that shouldn’t.