The annual approval of the gargantuan U.S. military budget is one of the most reliable rituals in Congress. It is so ordinary and overwhelmingly bipartisan, it\u2019s barely considered newsworthy, and few outlets follow the details of exactly how much the government is allocating to a nuclear weapons buildup, or deployments to the Asia Pacific, or the steady creep of U.S. military bases across the continent of Africa. Even under President Trump, when the Democratic leadership claims to have struck a more confrontational posture, those same leaders have repeatedly handed him bloated military budgets, as we saw Wednesday with Congress\u2019 bicameral approval of a roughly $740 billion military budget for 2021.<\/p>\n
It is really only Trump\u2019s threats to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), most recently<\/a> over his objections to some liability protections for social media companies, that cut through the noise. When that does happen, the headlines often look like this<\/a> one from ABC News: \u201cTrump’s veto threat on must-pass defense bill meets GOP resistance.\u201d (Otherwise \u201cobjective\u201d ABC News<\/em> has no problem randomly editorializing about the essentialness of the Pentagon budget. A search of ABC News\u2019<\/em> archives reveals no such \u201cmust-pass\u201d modifier for child healthcare, housing relief or covid-related relief.)<\/p>\n But this is no ordinary year. As Congress races to pass the NDAA for 2021, it does so in a country that is hurtling<\/a> toward months that could be among \u201cthe most difficult in the public health history of this nation,\u201d according to Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Along with this health crisis, whose scale in the United States was entirely preventable, comes economic devastation: Lines for food banks are stretching for miles<\/a> and, according to one study<\/a>, one in six people is food insecure. As of September, one in six<\/a> adults said they live in a house that\u2019s behind on rent.<\/p>\n The nearly $3 trillion in stimulus spending so far has come from bills passed in March and April, including the CARES Act, which together combined corporate bailouts and tax breaks for the wealthy with measures that, while insufficient, provided at least some genuine relief, including expanded unemployment insurance and $1,200 checks. But without a new relief package, roughly 12 million people are poised<\/a> to lose their unemployment benefits at the end of this year, and federal protections against evictions (which have been grossly insufficient and significantly walked back<\/a>) and deferment of student loan payments are also set to expire. While there are some reports<\/a> about renewed discussion of Covid relief, there has been little meaningful movement, and there\u2019s a good chance that stalled negotiations will bring unfathomable levels of economic devastation to tens of millions of people.<\/p>\n It is worth taking a moment to contrast this stalemate over coronavirus relief with bipartisan support for the U.S. war machine.<\/p>\n The United States has by far the biggest military budget on the planet, spending more than the next 10 countries combined. There is no indication that U.S. lawmakers plan to reverse this trend anytime soon: Each year the military budget has either increased<\/a> or roughly stayed the same since the height of the Iraq War. As the National Priorities Project pointed out<\/a> in June, the military budget in 2019 accounted for 53% of the federal discretionary budget. However, if you consider the \u201cmilitarized budget,\u201d including \u201cveterans\u2019 affairs, homeland security, and law enforcement and incarceration,\u201d this number jumps to 64.5% of the federal discretionary budget. But actual U.S. spending on wars is far greater. Writers Mandy Smithberger and William Hartung pointed out<\/a> last year, \u201cThere are at least 10 separate pots of money dedicated to fighting wars, preparing for yet more wars, and dealing with the consequences of wars already fought.\u201d As a result, the annual cost of war easily exceeds $1 trillion per year, Smithberger and Hartung conclude.<\/p>\n Being expensive in itself is not grounds for objection: Some really good things that we desperately need are expensive, like paying people to stay home so that they can survive the pandemic. The war budget is bad because the U.S. militarism, aggression and meddling that it finances are deeply harmful\u2014perhaps the most harmful forces on Earth. The United States has roughly 800 military bases around the world, undermining local self-determination, emitting environmental poison and carbon emissions, and bringing increased risk of sexual assault. The so-called \u201cWar on Terror\u201d has turned the whole planet into a U.S. battlefield, and now the United States is planning to intensify its militarization of the Asia-Pacific region in order to escalate against China, which the current NDAA reflects<\/a>, with bipartisan support. As the world suffered from the coronavirus pandemic, the United States continued its support for bombings in Yemen, ratcheted up brutal sanctions regimes, and now the Trump administration is, once again, engaging in dangerous brinkmanship with Iran, no doubt making the pandemic far worse for those caught in U.S. crosshairs.<\/p>\n As the pandemic was raging, Congress had no problem passing legislation to continue U.S. military violence. The Sen\u00adate ver\u00adsion<\/a> of the NDAA passed on July 23 in a vote of 86\u2009\u2013\u200914<\/a>, while the House ver\u00adsion<\/a> was approved July 21 by 295\u2009\u2013\u2009125<\/a>. This next defense bill, approved<\/a> December 2 by both chambers of Congress, is worth about $740 billion. To be fair, some have tried to use the pandemic to call for decreasing the military budget. In July, a proposal in both the House and the Senate to cut the military budget by 10% (or $74 billion), and divert those funds to social programs, failed. This proposed cut is a small fraction of what\u2019s needed to make a dent in the harmful U.S. military apparatus. Yet, according to<\/a> the National Priorities Project, even the $74 billion this proposal would have diverted could have funded 44 times as many coronavirus tests at the time, or provided housing for the over half a million homeless people in the country.<\/p>\n While entirely routine at this point, it’s useful to highlight on the eve of yet another massive Pentagon handout how the budget for war could instead go toward life-preserving social goods. This is useful, not to buy into austerity notions of scarcity, but simply to show the profound immorality of where our public resources go. When it comes to military spending, the sky is the limit. Space Force? Sure<\/a>. Roughly $21.9 bil\u00adlion for nuclear weapons pro\u00adgrams? No problem<\/a>. But when it comes to keeping people alive, U.S. political imagination is significantly more constrained. Right off the bat in March, Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.)\u2013\u2013before Republicans even said a word about it\u2013\u2013ruled out<\/a> universal, robust cash payments to keep people afloat, even as high-profile figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Rashi\u00adda Tlaib (D-Mich.) called for such measures.<\/p>\n This is not to say that Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame for the present impasse. As Hadas Thier wrote<\/a> for In These Times<\/em> in October, \u201cThe lion\u2019s share of respon\u00adsi\u00adbil\u00adi\u00adty for failed nego\u00adti\u00ada\u00adtions sure\u00adly lays at the Republicans\u2019 door, but the real\u00adi\u00adty is that des\u00adper\u00adate\u00adly need\u00aded eco\u00adnom\u00adic relief is being treat\u00aded as a polit\u00adi\u00adcal foot\u00adball on all sides.\u201d Rather, we should not allow bipartisan agreement on military spending to simply fade into the background, as an unremarkable and immutable fact of U.S. politics. That we can find the money for war but not for coronavirus relief exposes the moral rot at the center of U.S. politics, a rot that must be dug out and expunged if we are to get through this crisis.<\/p>\n\n