We’re also leaving out the fact that these are the only two officially designated adversaries on that list of nine big-spending countries, since all the others are either formal US allies (the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and South Korea) or security partners (India and Saudi Arabia).

This topline figure is an understatement in any case, since it doesn’t include the unprecedented emergency spending authorized for the Ukraine war and leaves out a variety of other spending related to national security.Ĭhina and Russia, by the way - the two authoritarian states we’re told this 8 percent cut will empower - spend, generously, $293 billion and (reportedly, and only as of this year) $84 billion on their respective militaries, which combined don’t even make up half of what US military spending would be if this cut actually happened. If it were cut by $75 billion, the budget would still be $6 billion more than what the next nine countries spent on their militaries combined in FY 2021. The military budget just passed by Congress is a record-high $858 billion, which was already $45 billion more than the president had requested in the first place.

It’s really hard to get across how absurd this is. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser declared those GOP members who pushed for the cut part of a “pro Russia caucus,” while MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough characterized the proposal as part of a “radical” and “anti-American approach.” The Joe Biden White House, meanwhile, accused the Freedom Caucus Republicans of “push to defund our military” and “making us less capable of keeping the American people safe. Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), who in an innovative twist does her CIA work from inside Congress these days, called it “an extraordinary departure” from the notion of investing in US national security. The memo containing these histrionic talking points clearly went out to both sides of the political aisle, because it wasn’t just the Right parroting them. Calling it a “horrible idea,” Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) fretted about how he could ask US allies to up their military spending when he visits Taiwan in a couple of weeks when “America is going to decrease ours.” Consummate militarist Liz Cheney charged that “weakness is provocative” and that “our nation will suffer,” a claim echoed by another neocon-turned-liberal-darling, Jennifer Rubin, who warned that it signaled a lack of resolve to “America’s enemies” and quoted every flavor of Washington war hawk arguing the idea “makes only authoritarians, despots and dictators smile” and that “ Putin and Xi Jinping will win.” Incoming House armed services chair Mike Rogers, for his part, claims he’s “not worried” about the military budget.īut to a certain extent this doesn’t matter, because the apoplectic response from the political and media establishment toward so much as the prospect of military spending being cut by $75 billion has been revealing in itself. Freedom Caucus member representative Andy Harris is insisting reduced military spending wasn’t part of the deal, as is another McCarthy holdout, Representative Chip Roy, who says that “cuts to defense were NEVER DISCUSSED” and that it’s the “woke & weaponized federal bureaucracy” that will shoulder the burden instead. The deal Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) struck with the GOP’s Freedom Caucus to secure speakership of the House only mandates a general discretionary spending freeze to FY 2022 levels, with no specific commitment on the military budget. No, instead, the United States’ cartoonishly gigantic military budget might get a modest cut.Įmphasis on might, because it’s not clear this is actually going to happen. But none of this is what’s currently causing dismay in the nation’s capital. Sure, millions of kids around the country are still living in poverty, homelessness is on the rise, and the United States remains unique in the world for having medical bills be the number-one cause of bankruptcy.

The sky is falling in Washington as the nation looks poised to plunge into an unspeakable crisis.

Us defense budget