This Thanksgiving It’s Time to Stop Stuffing the Defense Budget
Mandy Smithberger, Fred Ferreira
Security, United States
The transformation of OCO into the annual Thanksgiving turkey involved two important steps.
Stuffing—or “dressing”—recipes around the country vary from white bread to cornbread, potatoes to oysters. When it comes to Pentagon spending, lawmakers in Washington prefer “pork”, which is unfortunate for taxpayers.
In order to enhance our national security without increasing spending and deficits, this Thanksgiving Washington should take out the pork by reducing programs unrelated to national defense and pet projects not requested by the Pentagon. Nonetheless, the political environment from the past years has been conducive to increasing the pork, rather than forcing fiscal restraint—this needs to change.
The 2011 Budget Control Act brought a pause to the Washington dysfunction and disagreement and provided a period of some restraint in federal spending. The act set limits for defense and non-defense discretionary spending through the federal government. For the most part, each side of the equation got equally sized slices of the pie—creating a unique political environment in which, in order to raise defense spending it became necessary to increase non-defense spending to muster a strong enough coalition to reach sufficient votes.
However, not long after the ink was dry, spending-happy lawmakers started to devise ways to break the caps. With the Democrats controlling the executive branch and the Republicans controlling the House, the parties mostly pushed for their preferred side of the equation. The result, a recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) report found, was spending above the caps on both sides of the equation.
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