Despite Republican party control of the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives and the White House, a divided GOP needed the votes of minority Democrats to pass a two-year budget agreement. Although many Democrats had wanted to use their leverage to pass legislation to prevent the deportation of more than 700,000 DACA recipients – undocumented children brought to the U.S. by their parents – after a 5½ hour government shutdown, enough Democrats voted for the bill and President Trump signed the budget into law on Feb. 9.
The approved budget spends $500 billion more than current law allows by suspending a 2011 law pushed by “Freedom Caucus” conservatives that set hard caps on discretionary spending and included an automatic trigger known as “sequester” cuts if Congress attempted to bypass those spending caps. The budget deal for 2018 spends $700 billion for the military, and $591 billion for nonmilitary programs. Overall, 54 percent of the federal discretionary budget is now spent on the military and nuclear weapons.
President Trump’s recently announced 2019 budget, which is not likely to be passed by Congress, calls for a 14.1 percent increase in military spending – while making deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, education, food stamps, transportation and other essential government services. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project, who assesses the two-year federal budget deal passed by Congress and how the allocation of these federal funds impacts vital, non-military programs. [Rush transcript.]
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: The budget that Congress passed last week was the budget for fiscal year 2018, which actually started on Oct. 1, of last year, so it took them several months to get the job done. And a lot of the national attention about why the budget was so difficult to pass in Congress and what the disagreements were focused on the need for humanitarian solutions for the Dreamers – people who were brought to the United States as young children of immigrants and have since made their lives here. But what didn’t get quite as much attention was the differences between spending in the budget for the Pentagon, military and nuclear weapons v. spending for everything else that’s funded by the discretionary budget.
And that’s the part of the budget that’s over $1 trillion and that’s what Congress decides each year when they go through this budget process. And essentially, the question was, how much they would fund the Pentagon and military v. how much fund everything else? Now Democrats generally were trying to negotiate for more spending for things like education and health and the state department while they were also willing to accept higher spending on the Pentagon. Many Republicans wanted higher spending on the Pentagon without raising spending on those domestic things – although some of them wanted to cut both.
And the deal they came to was to raise spending a little bit for each. So they gave $80 billion above what were the previous spending limits to the Pentagon, and they gave $60 billion above the previous limits to everything else. And in Washington, D.C. politics this is what people refer to parity of spending between the Pentagon and between everything else.
But of course, $80 billion doesn’t equal $60 billion, so they’re not equal in that sense. And it’s also as if you took half of your inheritance and gave it to one child, and then took the other half and gave it to your four other children and called it equal. So there’s a couple of reasons of why parity is really a bad name for this.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Now Lindsay, in terms of the distribution of tax dollars toward military and non-military spending. What does it say about the nation’s priorities at the moment, in terms of the dollars going to fund new weapons systems, other projects the Pentagon has in mind, new fighter jets and all the rest, vs. what really needs to be addressed in terms of social programs, especially considering the growing gap between the rich and poor in this country?
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: Well, in almost any given year, more than half of our discretionary budget – that part that Congress decided last week –goes to the Pentagon and military. And, they maintained that ratio in this budget deal. Fifty-four percent of the funds they allocated will go the Pentagon and nuclear weapons, while the remaining 46 percent will go to everything else. So, clearly the priority that Congress places is that a military solution trumps – pardon the expression – everything else.
The budget the president released, which was his budget request for 2019, and does come into direct conflict with the budget limits that Congress set for 2019. So, it’s unlikely that this budget proposal will become a reality. But that’s always the case with presidential budget request.
But the budget request we saw chose clearly what the president’s priorities are and where he wants to see our government headed. And what we saw there was that he maintained Pentagon spending of over $700 billion a year, which is about a 10 percent increase over recent spending levels that we’ve had for the Pentagon. And it’s also a spending level that keeps us in the range of spending more than the next eight to 10 countries in the world combined. We spend more than three times as much as China. We spend nine times as much as Russia on our military, so our military spending is already sky high and now it’s growing.
BETWEEN THE LINES: What kind of policies do the minority Democrats, who certainly don’t have much control in the House or the Senate right now – what do they bring to the table in terms of their views on the levels of military spending that should be approved?
LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: It’s a wild mix. Last week, when the budget deal was passing in Congress, you had Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is the Senate leader of the Democrats saying that he supported both more military spending and spending for the middle class. So you had everything from that, to Democrats like Pramila Jayapal or Adam Smith in the House of Representatives, who question our military spending and really recognize there is such a thing as too much. And one of the things that I think that people who, across the political spectrum, again this is not limited to Democrats – there are definitely fiscal hawk Republicans who are very interested in seeing us call back some of the wasteful Pentagon spending that’s out there. We need to make it more understood that more Pentagon spending does not equal more safety.
For more information, visit the National Priorities Project at nationalpriorities.org.
