In the next budget federal spending on the military will greatly exceed spending on programs of social uplift

By Herbert Rothschild

Between 2011 and 2021, there was a rough parity between annual appropriations to the military and to nonmilitary programs. Those were the years when the Budget Control Act of 2011 was in effect. Passed in response to the debt ceiling crisis that year, it created caps on those two categories of discretionary spending. If Congress exceeded those caps, equal cuts automatically would kick in. And if the caps were raised, they were raised equally also.

That parity is no longer in effect. The Trump administration and a compliant House of Representatives is slashing the funding of human service programs in a desperate effort to reduce the budget deficit that will result from the extension and increase of tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and the corporations they control. Meanwhile, they not only don’t intend to cut the military budget but actually to increase it.

No fiscal 2025 budget was enacted. A Republican-controlled Congress wouldn’t pass the last budget President Joe Biden submitted. Instead, the government has been operating on a series of continuing resolutions. The most recent one raised military spending to $893 billion, a $6 billion increase over 2024. Conversely, it reduced discretionary spending on nondefense programs by $13 billion. We can expect the 2026 budget, when it is finally passed, to widen that gap significantly.

A word about the term “discretionary” in reference to federal spending. The first budget to include programs for which Congress did not have the discretion to appropriate money — namely, the trust funds like Social Security and Medicare, which are self-funded — was fiscal 1969.

One motive for that change was to provide a unified picture of all federal expenditures. Another, however, was to disguise how large a percentage of the tax money Congress directly controlled was being spent on the war in Vietnam and the military generally. Grouping the mandatory annual payouts from the trust funds with discretionary spending on education, health and other programs made it seem that our elected officials were choosing to devote a much bigger percentage of the money they appropriated to social uplift than they really were.

Even when the trust funds are subtracted from the annual federal budget, the financial burden of our war making and preparations for future war making doesn’t clearly emerge unless we look beyond appropriations to the Department of Defense. Function 50 of the budget groups the Defense appropriation with funding for the nuclear weapons programs under the control of the Department of Energy and some military expenditures by other departments. But there is still much more.

On Tax Day, peace activists often go to post offices to hand out the War Resisters League flyer titled “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes.” Volunteers from Peace House did that on Tuesday in Ashland and Medford, as reported in Ashland.news. What WRL researchers do is include in our annual military spending the interest the Treasury pays on that portion (80%) of the national debt incurred by our wars. They also add the annual appropriation for veterans benefits and for military programs in various other agencies.

Using that method, the flyer this year indicates that if the budget Biden proposed for 2025 is projected into fiscal 2026, military spending would account for 46% of discretionary spending versus 42% for domestic programs. And if the budget favored by people surrounding Trump is enacted, military spending will account for 50% of discretionary spending and domestic programs only 38%.

Even during the years when there was parity between these two portions of the federal budget, the conception of national security expressed thereby was problematic. Now, however, that deep cuts in spending are planned for education, health, nutrition, housing, community development, environmental protection, energy assistance and so much else, it’s clear that our federal government itself is assaulting the people whom all its military spending is ostensibly meant to protect from assault.

No doubt, there is some waste in the agencies being cut — every large operation has some waste — but Elon Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency made no effort to identify the waste before they began wielding the meat-ax. Republicans in Congress seem ready to go along. But if eliminating waste were really their motive, then they should have begun with the Department of Defense. Its control of our money has been so lax for so long that decades ago the U.S. Government Accountability Office gave up on trying to audit it.   

Here follow three examples — one from long ago, one recent and one current — of Defense Department waste that far exceed anything one might find in agencies like the Department of Education or the Bureau of Land Management.

In the 1970s, Litton Industries had a contract with the U.S. Navy for 30 Spruance-class destroyers and five landing helicopter assault ships. The total contract initially was $1.9 billion. The final cost was $4.726 billion. Here are some of the problems that required extensive remediation: Poor welding, misaligned components, substandard installation of critical components, leaky fuel tanks, faulty piping systems and improper electrical wiring. Litton was required to pay $200 million of the cost overrun; U.S. taxpayers covered the rest.

Lockheed Martin is the primary contractor for the F-35 Lightning II multirole stealth fighter. The initial cost estimate per plane was $40 million. As of 2023, the cost was $82 million to $85 million for the F-35A, $108 million to $110 million for the F-35B, and $103 million to $106 million for the F-35C. There were multiple problems so serious that Air Force pilots didn’t want to fly the planes. These included safety, reliability and inability to carry out the assigned missions.

Now there is the Sentinel program, which is intended to replace all our land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. This is part of a 30-year, $1.7 trillion overhaul of our nuclear arsenal. Originally projected to cost $77.7 billion, the estimate for the Sentinel missiles has been revised upward to $141 billion. The final cost is almost certain to be higher. Not only is it unnecessary to replace the existing Minute Man III missiles, but also we would greatly reduce the risk of a nuclear war caused by human error if we scrapped the land-based missile leg of our nuclear triad and relied mainly on our submarine-based ICBMs.  

The costly, deadly folly I briefly discussed in the previous paragraph will be focus of a symposium called “The New Nuclear Arms Race” to be held next Friday, April 25, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at SOU’s Stevenson Union. The symposium is a joint project of Peace House and SOU’s Department of History, Economics and Politics. For more information, visit peacehouse.net/the-new-nuclear-arms-race.

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected].