Only eight senators voted against the National Defense Authorization Act, with a bipartisan Senate majority sending the defense spending bill to the president’s desk on Tuesday.
The fact that 86 senators actually agreed on something is an instant red flag that the bill is a swamp disaster. Thankfully, one elected official, Sen. Rand Paul, is willing to call the madness out — despite how unpopular, on its face, opposing increasing military funding might seem.
The libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican voted against the bill, railing against it on the Senate floor and penning an op-ed for the American Conservative slamming the bloated bill. The senator dubbed the bipartisan deal a “big-spending nightmare jam-packed with things that have nothing to do with the military.”
A big-spending nightmare, indeed. The bill authorizes almost $740 billion in defense spending, a $20 billion increase over last year that comes as part of a bigger spending package that will add $500 million to the deficit. This, as Paul notes, is an unreasonably high amount.
The senator writes:
It’s important to understand the factual context of how U.S. military spending compares internationally to see just how spot-on Paul’s comments are. We spend more on the military than the next seven countries — combined.
That’s right: You can add up the military spending of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and the United States still spends more than all seven combined by $40 billion, per 2019 figures. Clearly, we have room to make cuts and roll back overspending without falling behind our rivals and allies in defense spending.
So why do both party establishments continue to spend our tax money on our bloated military? It’s sad but simple: There’s an entire military-industrial complex that benefits from our overspending, and the established interests in those areas, such as weapons manufacturers and defense contractors, reward and bully policymakers into continued runaway spending.
Yet part of the problem, too, is that our military is currently asked to do far too much. A necessary component of cutting back military spending is rolling back how much we ask of our brave servicemen and servicewomen.
As Paul put it:
He’s right. We have active-duty troops in roughly 150 countries, including tens of thousands of our soldiers risking their lives in endless wars and failed nation-building experiments in Middle Eastern countries such as Syria and Afghanistan.
In fact, our forces are currently deployed so widespread that calling this $740 billion bill “defense spending” is misleading. Only a fraction of it will actually be spent defending our country and untold billions instead spent policing the world. So if Congress finally heeds Paul’s advice and decides to stop wasting so much taxpayer money, it’s quite clear where we should start.
