The United States spends, by far, more on its military than other nations. U.S. military spending is more than the next nine countries combined; it is 12 times the amount Russia spends.
Yet demands persist from the military-industrial complex to spend ever more. For fiscal year 2023, the Biden Administration has requested a $31 billion increase in Pentagon spending, to $813 billion. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees in July authorized an additional $37 billion and $45 billion. The final total will likely be resolved in December; if anything, it may jump even further toward the $900 billion mark, with the trillion-dollar threshold in view for fiscal year 2024.
The fact that the United States spends so much more than all other countries on the military should, at bare minimum, be an enormous warning sign suggesting that further increases are not needed. But if that spending discrepancy is a warning sign, the pervasive and systemic waste at the Pentagon should be a five-alarm notice to stop spending more – and begin looking at cuts.
The Pentagon announced in November that it failed its fifth consecutive audit, its latest since the agency was first required to start auditing itself in 2018. Although agency officials have repeatedly promised improvements, this year’s audit made little progress from last year’s.
Back in 2015, the Pentagon completed – and then buried — a report identifying a “clear path” to $125 billion in savings on administrative waste over five years.
Pentagon spending is replete with waste and fraud both small (a spare parts maker with a 3,800 percent profit level) and large (the defective and dysfunctional F-35 program that will cost more than $1.7 trillion over its projected 50-year lifespan, according to the Project on Government Oversight). The Pentagon, in fact, is seeking an extra boost in the current budget for even more on the F-35, as well as other purported needs, according to a Pentagon wish list sent to Congress and obtained by Bloomberg.
The Pentagon itself knows that waste and fraud is rampant – but it fails to exert basic controls. Back in 2015, the Pentagon completed – and then buried – a report identifying a “clear path” to $125 billion in savings on administrative waste over five years.
Why in the world should we keep throwing money at an agency with a record like this? Would Republicans or Democrats or anyone with common sense tolerate this kind of waste at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the Department of Labor? Actually, it’s a trick question. That level of waste – the $25 billion annually identified by the Pentagon itself, all the way back in 2015 and not even tallying the waste on failed systems like the F-35 – is more than the ENTIRE budget of the EPA or Department of Labor.
Why do we in fact spend so much on the military, given the widespread waste and the fact that U.S. vastly outspends all other rivals and allies? The short answer is: the corrosive power of the military-industrial complex. About half the Pentagon budget is spent on military contractors. Those contractors prop up think tanks that concoct rationalizations for why we must always spend more. The leading contractors and the Pentagon itself strategically deploy their production and subcontracting so that almost every congressional district has some number of jobs attributable to the Pentagon.
And, of course, the military contractors lather spending on members of Congress, focusing on the military spending committees. A July Public Citizen study found that contractors contributed $10 million in the 2022 election cycle – with final numbers for the cycle certain to be far higher – to the members of the armed services committees. Members who supported increasing the military budget over and above the increase requested by the Biden Administration received three times the amount of contributions as those who opposed the extra increase.
Why in the world should we keep throwing money at an agency with a record like this?
But while it is conventional wisdom inside the Beltway that more military spending is the politically smart play, the American people don’t agree. Polling from Data for Progress and Public Citizen in May 2022 indicates that spending more on the military than requested by President Biden would be out of step with public sentiment. A strong majority of voters oppose an increase in military spending above Biden’s request. Sixty-three percent of those polled say the military’s budget should remain at the level that Biden and the Department of Defense requested. For good reason, opposition to raising Pentagon spending still further is bipartisan. When informed about how much the military is poised to receive as compared to other agencies, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents all strongly agree the military budget should not be raised further (among Republicans: 51 percent vs. 37 percent who think too little is spent).
Yet no matter the waste, amount spent compared to other countries, or public attitudes, those arguing for more Pentagon spending always have a single demand — more. Now the military-industrial complex is claiming still more increases in Pentagon outlays are necessitated by inflation. This argument ignores the fact that the Biden request already accounted for inflation and the fact that the Pentagon does not experience inflation in the same way as the general economy, in part because many of its costs are set by long-term contracts. Others say the Ukraine war necessitates more spending. But the U.S. already spends far more than Russia, and Ukraine-specific expenses are being funded by supplemental spending bills and should not be incorporated into the Pentagon’s base budget.
U.S. military spending is now greater than the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or the Reagan build-up in the early 1980s. You don’t need to be a budget hawk – just someone who believes in the prudential management of taxpayer dollars – to recognize it is past time to end Pentagon budget increases and impose some fiscal discipline on the agency.
Robert Weissman is the president of Public Citizen.