President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda on which they ran in the 2020 election is being held hostage by two corporate Democratic Senators—fossil fuel consigliere Joe Manchin of West Virginia and payday lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
The Military-Industrial Complex exploits flaws in what is, at best, a weak, quasi-democratic political system to defy the will of the people and spend more public money on weapons and armed forces than the world’s next thirteen military powers combined.
The week before the Democrats’ $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this wall of corporate money bags, all but thirty-eight House Democrats voted to hand over more than twice that amount to the Pentagon. Senator Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill as “fiscal insanity,” but he has voted for a much larger Pentagon budget every year since 2016.
Maintaining this pattern, Congress just doled out $12 billion for eighty-five more F-35 warplanes, six more than Donald Trump bought in 2020.
The 2022 military spending bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, that passed the House on September 23 would hand a whopping $740 billion to the Pentagon and $38 billion to other departments (mainly the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons), for a total of $778 billion in military spending, a $37 billion increase over this year’s current military budget. The Senate will soon debate its version of the bill.
Two House amendments to make modest cuts failed: one by Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California to strip out the $24 billion that was added to Biden’s budget request by the House Armed Services Committee, and another by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York for an across-the-board 10 percent cut (with exceptions for military pay and health care).
After adjusting for inflation, this enormous budget is comparable to the peak of Trump’s arms build-up in 2020, and is only 10 percent below the post-WWII record set by George W. Bush in 2008 under cover of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2019, the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland conducted a study in which it briefed ordinary Americans on the federal budget deficit and asked them how they would address it. The average respondent favored cutting the deficit by $376 billion, mainly by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, but also by cutting an average of $51 billion from the military budget. Even Republicans who were surveyed favored cutting $14 billion from the Pentagon, while Democrats supported a much larger $100 billion cut.
Similarly, a study by the Political Economy Research Center at the University of Massachusetts determined that military spending creates fewer jobs than almost any other form of government spending. It found that $1 billion invested in the military yields an average of 11,200 jobs, while the same amount invested in other areas yields significantly more; 26,700 jobs when invested in education, 17,200 in health care, 16,800 in the green economy, and 15,100 jobs would be created if the money were spent simply in cash stimulus or welfare payments.
So why is Congress so out of touch with the foreign policy desires of their constituents?
The Military-Industrial Complex exploits flaws in what is, at best, a weak, quasi-democratic political system to defy the will of the people and spend more public money on weapons and armed forces than the world’s next thirteen military powers combined.
The five largest U.S. arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics) account for 40 percent of the arms industry’s federal campaign contributions; since 2001, they have collectively received $2.2 trillion in Pentagon contracts in return for those contributions. Altogether, 54 percent of military spending ends up in the accounts of corporate military contractors, earning them $8 trillion over the last two decades.
The House and Senate Armed Services Committees sit at the very center of the Military-Industrial Complex, and their senior members are the largest recipients of arms industry cash in Congress.
There is another less discussed reason for the disconnect between what the public wants and how Congress votes, which can be found in a 2004 study by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations titled “The Hall of Mirrors: Perceptions and Misperceptions in the Congressional Foreign Policy Process.”
This study found a broad consensus between the foreign policy views of lawmakers and the public, but that “in many cases, Congress has voted in ways that are inconsistent with these consensus positions.”
The authors made a counterintuitive discovery about the views of congressional staffers. “Curiously, staffers whose views were at odds with the majority of their constituents showed a strong bias toward assuming, incorrectly, that their constituents agreed with them,” the study found, “while staffers whose views were actually in accord with their constituents more often than not assumed this was not the case.”
Overall, on nine important foreign policy issues, an average of only 38 percent of congressional staffers could correctly identify whether a majority of the public supported or opposed a range of different policies they were asked about.
On the other side of the equation, the study found that “Americans’ assumptions about how their own member votes appear to be frequently incorrect. . . . [I]n the absence of information, it appears that Americans tend to assume, often incorrectly, that their member is voting in ways that are consistent with how they would like their member to vote.”
When members of Congress come to Washington, D.C. with little or no foreign policy experience, as many do, they must take the trouble to study hard from a wide range of sources, and to seek foreign policy advice from outside the corrupt Military-Industrial Complex.
Members of the public should contact their representatives’ offices regularly to make their voices heard, and work with issues-related civil society groups to hold these elected officials accountable for their votes on issues they care about.
With future military budget fights, we must build a strong popular movement that rejects the flagrantly anti-democratic decision to transition from a brutal and bloody, self-perpetuating “war on terror” to an equally unnecessary and wasteful, but even more dangerous, arms race with Russia and China.
As some in Congress continue to ask how we can afford to take care of our children or ensure future life on this planet, progressives in Congress must not only call for taxing the rich but also for axing the Pentagon’s budget.
While it may be too late to reverse course this year, progressives must stake out a line in the sand for next year’s military budget that reflects what the public desires and the world so desperately needs: to roll back the destructive, gargantuan war machine, and to invest in health care and a livable climate, not bombs and F-35s.