What are we Getting for Record Defense Spending?
Fine Print
JUNE 28TH, 2022 BY WALTER PINCUS | 0 COMMENTS
Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.
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OPINION — Next year’s national defense spending — for the Defense Department, the Department of Energy [for nuclear weapons] and other security agencies — may be tens of billions more than the $813 fiscal 2023 billion budget sought by President Biden and perhaps the only important legislation that will draw major bipartisan support in Congress.
Support for authorizing defense spending is so great, that both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees have authorized $47 billion and $37 billion more, respectively, than the President sought — even though his request was more than $30 billion above the $778 billion being spent this year.
We are talking about authorizing record national defense spending thanks to inflation, U.S. support for Ukraine, the threats seen in Congress from Russia and China, and individual lawmakers’ desires to support local military bases and defense contractors.
So far, the Democratic-controlled House and Senate Appropriations Committees have not shown the same enthusiasm for defense spending.
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