Tag Archives: Defense budget

Calling Musk’s Bluff

I have long admired Elizabeth Warren, and recently she’s given me another reason to salute her. She has called Elon Musk’s bluff–while shining a bright light on his ignorance and naivety.

As anyone who follows the news knows, Musk has bragged that he can cut two trillion dollars out of the federal budget. His hints about how he plans to accomplish that feat mostly revolve around sticking it to the poor, ill and elderly via cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and making it impossible for the federal government to do its job by slashing the federal workforce.

Warren’s advice to Musk has done two things: it has demonstrated that there are alternative ways to cut spending, and has reinforced the reality that funding decisions are policy decisions–that where and how government spends money is a reliable guide to what it considers important.

Time Magazine had the story. In a letter that Warren sent to Musk, she listed 30 recommendations for eliminating $2 trillion in federal spending over the next decade.

The list includes several of the progressive icon’s long-held policy fixations: renegotiating Department of Defense (DOD) contracts that independent analysts have found waste billions each year; reforming the Medicare Advantage insurance program and allowing Medicare to negotiate lower costs of prescription drugs; and closing tax loopholes for corporations and the wealthiest earners.

As the article noted, Musk has already walked back his promise to cut two trillion out of the budget, given that he is constrained by Trump’s vows not to touch Medicare and Social Security, and Republican refusal to cut military spending, (As the article notes, “DOGE will have to find less conventional ideas to fulfill Musk’s budget-slashing fantasy.” )

For years, Democrats and Republicans alike have wanted to curb wasteful government spending. While much of Washington recoils at Trump’s disruptive, norm-shattering second-term agenda, some see an opportunity for strange bedfellows to emerge. “In the interest of taking aggressive, bipartisan action to ensure sustainable spending, protect taxpayer dollars, curb abusive practices by giant corporations, and improve middle-class Americans’ quality of life,” Warren writes to Musk, “I would be happy to work with you on these matters.”

As the article notes, actual collaboration is probably not Warren’s goal–her letter is undoubtedly intended to make a point  rather than inviting Musk to work together. Musk, after all, is one of those “let them eat cake” deficit hawks who insist the only way to cut budget deficits is to slash the entitlement programs that prevent millions of Americans from falling into grinding poverty.

I am an advocate for a Universal Basic Income, and I take very seriously the (reasonable) charge that so expensive a measure would require massive changes to the federal budget. Accordingly, I’ve researched what experts (not self-engrossed billionaires) have to say about where we might cut current expenditures. Among the obvious possibilities are the obscene subsidies we continue to give to fossil fuel companies, and the incredibly bloated defense budget. (Even pro-defense scholars estimate that defense spending could be cut by 25% without damaging  U.S. defense capabilities.)

Warren points to similar research.

The biggest cost-saving idea in Warren’s letter is to preserve $200 billion by renegotiating Defense contracts. She points to an Inspector General report from 2011 that found contractors regularly hike prices for the military. One egregious example includes the Air Force overpaying 7,943% on soap dispensers. To rectify the problem, she urged passing legislation she previously introduced with Mike Braun, the former Republican Senator from Indiana, that would close loopholes to prevent defense contractors from price gouging the DOD. “There is a huge problem of the government being able to supervise these contractors carefully enough to be able to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth,” says Don Kettl, an expert on government administration and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

Kettl recently wrote an essay in the Washington Monthly arguing that the federal government needs more and better skilled civil servants to oversee contractors and that Musk and Trump’s plans to massively reduce the federal workforce will perversely lead to higher, not lower, government spending. “The argument is that the market can do the government’s work better and cheaper,” Kettl says. “The problem is that that’s not always the case, and contractors often get higher wages.”

Musk and Trump and their ilk continue to prove the accuracy of that old H.L. Mencken quote:”For every complex problem, there’s a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

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What Else Could We Do With A Trillion Dollars?

I’m not sure where I came across the article I’m going to discuss today; Monthly Review is not one of my typical sources. (The magazine styles itself as an “independent socialist” publication.) I may have clicked through from a different resource.

That said, if the numbers it reports are even close to accurate, it’s very depressing. I am pasting in the rather lengthy first paragraph, which identifies some of the sources of those numbers–sources which certainly seem legitimate–to allow you to make your own assessment.

For decades, it has been recognized by independent researchers that actual U.S. military spending is approximately twice the officially acknowledged level.1 In 2022, actual U.S. military spending reached $1.537 trillion—more than twice the officially acknowledged level of $765.8 billion. Data on U.S. military spending reported by the U.S. government, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI, generally considered the definitive source on international military expenditures), and NATO all primarily rely on the figures of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These data, however, are subject to two major shortcomings. First, the numbers provided by the OMB with respect to “defense spending” are substantially lower than those provided in the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), the most complete and definitive source on U.S. national income and expenditures as a whole, constituting an input-output approach to the whole economy, and the basis of all analysis of the U.S. economy. Second, as is well-known, key areas of U.S. military spending are included in other parts of federal expenditures and do not fall under the OMB’s “defense spending” category. Although SIPRI and NATO adopt wider definitions of “defense spending” than the U.S. government and claim to increase their estimates using the OMB figures as a base, in practice, they do so only marginally and in ways that are not entirely transparent, with the result that their figures are only slightly above those of the officially acknowledged U.S. figures.

The article goes on to detail what is included (medical costs for military personnel, for example), citatons to academic studies and official agency computations, and includes several charts. Bottom line, it asserts that actual U.S. military spending in 2022 came to $1.537 trillion dollars, rather than the (already huge) $765.8 billion in defense spending acknowledged by OMB.

I was already convinced that the United States spends far too much on defense–we spend more than the next ten countries combined–and I’m absolutely gobsmacked by the likelihood  that the real number is $1.537 trillion.

I’ve seen estimates–based upon the lower reported number–that 25% of the defense budget could be cut without affecting the country’s military readiness. What if we accept those estimates and apply the same, very conservative approach, cutting twenty-five percent out of that massive amount? We would have an additional $384 billion dollars to spend every single year on programs that serve the common good.

Think what we could do with that much additional income every year. We could pay the nation’s teachers what they’re worth. We could fill millions of potholes, and fix our substandard bridges. We could plant trees, establish parks, provide affordable childcare… That much money would certainly make a Universal Basic Income more affordable. The list goes on.

One of the reasons America’s defense budget is so bloated is because those dollars enrich the districts where armaments are manufactured and military personnel stationed–a reality that makes both Republican and Democratic representatives of those districts very protective of the Pentagon’s budget. Former Senator John McCain–a supporter of the armed forces–criticized what he called “the military-industrial-congressional complex.” The upshot is that it will be extremely difficult to scale back these expenditures.

It will be even more difficult to change the pro-military worldview.

The Japanese have a saying: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When a country spends more than a trillion dollars a year on tools of war, it shouldn’t surprise the citizens of that country that it is perennially at war somewhere around the globe.

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The Real Obscenity

If your definition of “obscenity” is sexual, you can stop reading now.

Lockheed Martin recently held a conference for Defense contractors, at which they shared the “good news” about global conflicts.

Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President Bruce Tanner told the conference his company will see “indirect benefits” from the war in Syria, citing the Turkish military’s recent decision to shoot down a Russian warplane.

Executives of OshKosh and Raytheon reported equally positive business prospects, noting “significant upticks” for sales of military equipment due to ISIS and unrest across the Middle East.

The last bit of good news for the contractors is the latest budget deal in Congress. After years of cuts following the budget sequester, the deal authorizes $607 billion in defense spending, just $5 billion down from the Pentagon’s request, which DefenseNews called a “treat” for the industry.

America’s infrastructure—our roads, bridges, electrical grid, water utilities, rail—is dangerously deteriorated. Our cities are struggling to hire sufficient police. Our schools lack supplies, our teachers are underpaid, and we can’t find the money for universal kindergarten, let alone day care. We have nothing that can compare to Europe’s public transportation systems, or China’s high-speed rail. Our right-wing lawmakers are furious that we are finally making basic medical care accessible, and they insist we cannot afford to continue social security and other social safety net programs at current levels.

But we can evidently afford to spend more than the rest of the world combined for defense, and the military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned us. We seem able to find billions for the armaments that keep defense contractors fat and happy, while we starve the “homeland” and citizens we are supposedly protecting.

That’s my definition of obscene.

We talk a lot about the growth of American inequality, and the focus of those conversations is usually on income–wage stagnation, the incredibly bloated salaries paid to Wall Street “movers and shakers,” a tax system that allows mega-millionaires to avoid paying their fair shares.

All of those issues are important. But in a properly functioning society, where all taxpayers do pay their fair share, government is responsible for using that tax money to provide a physical and social infrastructure serving all its citizens, rich or poor.

We recognize third-world countries by inequalities of infrastructure; they are places where the wealthy hire their own police or bodyguards, live in gated compounds where they pave the streets and landscape parks for their own use, while segregating themselves from the wretched surroundings inhabited by the less fortunate. Those countries often support and valorize highly privileged military establishments.

If, as most knowledgable observers claim, the threats America faces are significantly different than in the past—if those threats come primarily from non-state terrorists—we need fewer tanks and bombs and missiles, and more targeted and surgical strategies.

We can defend the legitimate interests of the United States without unnecessarily enriching the military-industrial complex, and without maintaining the current bloated and obscenely expensive defense establishment.

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