The bloated Pentagon budget passed again
By U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders
Editor’s note: On Wednesday, July 26, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered remarks on the floor of the Senate explaining why he was voting ‘no’ on the $886 billion defense budget. The Senate voted 86-11 in support of the bill the next day. Sanders’ remarks, exactly as prepared for delivery, are below.
M. President, the Senate is now debating an $886 billion defense authorization bill. Unless there are major changes to this bill, I intend to vote against it. Let me explain why.
As everyone knows, our country faces enormous crises.
As a result of climate change our planet is experiencing unprecedented and rising temperatures. Along with the rest of the world, we need to make major investments to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into more efficient and sustainable energy sources, or the life we leave our kids and future generations will become increasingly unhealthy and precarious.
Our healthcare system is broken. While the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry make hundreds of billions in profit, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, our life expectancy is declining, and we have a massive shortage of doctors, nurses, mental health practitioners and dentists.
Our educational system is teetering. While we have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of almost any major country, millions of parents cannot find affordable and quality childcare. The number of our young people who graduate from college is falling behind many other countries and 45 million Americans are struggling under the weight of student debt.
Our housing stock is totally inadequate. While gentrification is causing rents to soar in many parts of our country some 600,000 Americans are homeless, and 18 million are spending more than half of their limited incomes on housing.
These are just some of the crises our country faces. And what is very clear is that we are not dealing with them. In other words, we continue to ignore issues that impact tens of millions of Americans.
That is one reality. But then there is another reality, and that is the issue of the Pentagon and defense spending. Well, that’s a whole other story.
Every year, with seemingly little regard for the strategic picture facing the country, this body votes to increase the military budget.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan end and tens of thousands of troops are brought home, yet still the Pentagon’s budget goes up.
Every year, despite partisan fights on all manner of things, Congress comes together with little debate to vote for the one thing they seem to agree on: more and more money for the Pentagon.
Right now, despite all of the enormous needs facing working families in this country, over half of the discretionary budget goes to the military.
Mr. President, I support a strong military. But I will oppose this legislation for four main reasons.
First, more military spending is unnecessary. The United States remains the world’s dominant military power and is in no danger of losing that position.
Alone, we account for roughly 40% of global military spending. This comes despite the end of the war in Afghanistan and despite the fact that the United States spends more on the military than the next 10 countries combined, most of whom are allies. Last year, we spent more than three times what China spent on its military, and more than ten times what Russia spent.
And while this year’s NDAA would merely match the Pentagon’s record budget request, in most recent years Congress has seen fit to give the Department of Defense (DOD) more money than it even asks for, requiring that it submit “wish lists” of items to Congress. The Pentagon is routinely given so much taxpayer money it literally does not know what to do with it. According to the GAO, over an 11-year period, the Pentagon returned an astonishing $128 billion in excess funds back to the Treasury.
They couldn’t even spend the money Congress gave them.
Second, the Pentagon cannot keep track of the dollars it already has, leading to massive waste, fraud, and abuse in the sprawling military industrial complex.
The Pentagon accounts for about two-thirds of all federal contracting activity, obligating more money every year than all civilian federal agencies combined. Yet the (DOD) remains the only major federal agency that cannot pass an independent audit, more than 30 years after Congress required it to do so.
Last year, the department was unable to account for over half of its assets, which are in excess of $3.1 trillion, or roughly 78% of what the entire federal government owns. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that DOD still cannot accurately track its finances or capture and post transactions to the correct accounts. Each year, auditors find billions of dollars in the Pentagon’s proverbial couch cushions; in fiscal year 2022, Navy auditors found $4.4 billion in untracked inventory, while Air Force auditors identified $5.2 billion worth of variances in its general ledger.
These problems are why Senator Grassley and I have again introduced our Audit the Pentagon Act, with a number of co-sponsors, which would force the Pentagon to get serious about these shortcomings by reducing by 1% the budget of any DOD component that cannot pass an audit. A meaningful effort to address this waste should be undertaken before Congress throws more money at the Pentagon, yet this absolutely necessary oversight is again missing from this bill.
In June, the GAO found that in the preceding year — a single year! – DOD’s largest acquisition programs had seen cost estimates rise by $37 billion.
This comes after decades in which we spent more than $2 trillion on ill-considered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Somehow, despite this record of waste and fraud, the military-industrial complex escapes meaningful scrutiny.
Third, much of this additional military spending will go to line the pockets of hugely profitable defense contractors—it is corporate welfare by a different name.
Almost half of the Pentagon budget goes to private contractors, some of whom are exploiting their monopoly positions and the trust granted them by the United States to line their pockets. Repeated investigations by the DOD Inspector General, the GAO, and CBS News have uncovered numerous instances of contractors massively over-charging DOD, helping boost these companies’ profit margins to nearly 40%—and sometimes as high as 4,451%—while costing U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. TransDigm, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon are among the offenders, dramatically overcharging the taxpayer while reaping enormous profits, seeing their stock prices soar, and handing out massive executive compensation packages.
As an example, last year, Lockheed Martin received $46 billion in unclassified federal contracts, returned $11 billion to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks, and paid its CEO $25 million. These companies are fully reliant on the U.S. taxpayer, yet their CEOs make over a hundred times more than the Secretary of Defense, and 500% more than the average newly enlisted service member.
TransDigm, the company behind the 4,451% markup on spare parts, touted $3.1 billion in profits on $5.4 billion of net sales, almost boasting to investors about just how fully it was fleecing the taxpayer. Indeed, over the past two decades, major defense contractors have paid billions in fines or related settlements for fraud or misconduct. Just the other day, the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton was fined $377 million for overcharging the Defense Department.
Yet the contracts never dry up.
This is why I introduced an amendment to this year’s NDAA to require the Secretary of Defense to produce an updated report on defense contractor fraud. The amendment was not included.
Mr. President, if this pandemic has taught us anything — a public health crisis that cost us over a million lives — it is that national security relies on much more than just a strong military. True security means doing everything we can to improve the lives of ordinary Americans, in terms of healthcare, education, nutrition, housing, and, of course, climate change and the environment.
This body could decide to have one or two fewer ballistic missile submarines, saving almost $15 billion over the next decade, and put that money toward housing the homeless or feeding the five million children in this country who are food-insecure.
Instead, day after day here in Washington, many of my colleagues tell the American people that we just don’t have the money. They say we can’t guarantee healthcare to all, can’t provide quality education for our kids, can’t build affordable housing, and can’t do what we need to do to prevent our planet from becoming uninhabitable.
Mr. President, let me conclude by reiterating that I believe in a strong military. But we cannot keep throwing money at the Pentagon while veterans can’t access adequate health care, millions of children go hungry, and so many Americans can’t afford the basic necessities of life.
We have emergencies here at home that we must address: from the climate crisis that recently blanketed our cities in smoke, to the floods that recently devastated my home state of Vermont, to the outrageously high price of childcare, housing and healthcare.
Here’s the good news: in the richest country on Earth, we do not need to force false choices. We can fund critical domestic priorities while maintaining a strong military, caring for our veterans, and getting Ukraine what it needs. But it will require the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share in taxes, and it will require members of Congress to care less about the profits of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or Raytheon, and more about the needs of working people.
Now is time to rethink what we value as a society and to fundamentally transform our national priorities.
