This week, the House of Representatives passed a $1.5 trillion spending bill to fund the U.S. government through September. The passage of this gargantuan 2,741-page piece of legislation comes after several stop-gap measures to keep the government open.
Normally, annual funding bills don’t receive much attention. This one, however, is different because it dumps $782 billion, or a little more than half of the total discretionary spending, into national defense programs. This would be the highest per-dollar defense budget in history.
The defense hawks who dominate the congressional armed services committees are no doubt clinking their champagne glasses. You can’t blame them for celebrating. When President Joe Biden released his 2022 defense budget request, he asked for a total of $753 billion, a 1.6% increase from the previous year. As the request wound its way through Congress, the armed services committees rejected the number as insufficient for a multitude of reasons. The committees wound up adding $25 billion to the Biden administration’s figure. The grand total of $782 billion appropriated this week is $4 billion more than what even the armed services committees authorized.
The rest of the country doesn’t have much to be happy about.
While polls are always a bit fickle, and the war in Ukraine may change things, a survey conducted by Gallup in April 2021 found that only 26% of the public thinks the United States is spending too little on defense. But there’s another reason we should be troubled by the latest cash infusion into the defense trough: It reinforces a bad habit in the U.S. policy elite, which equates higher defense budgets with more security.
Lawmakers, many of whom have an incentive to give the Pentagon what it wants in order to keep defense-related jobs in their districts, ask a few probing questions but are largely happy with writing the check (and, as we see this year, sometimes writing a bigger check than even the commanders want).
Yet a bigger pot of money is not the same as a credible defense strategy. If the underlying strategy is faulty, no amount of funds can fix it. If anything, throwing more money at the problem only exacerbates it. The more resources the Pentagon has, the less willing policymakers will be to make difficult but necessary choices about which missions the U.S. military should conduct, where U.S. forces should be allocated, and what tools are most needed. Why make these hard choices when you can just do it all?
Well, because, over time, doing it all just isn’t sustainable. It’s not sustainable fiscally unless the U.S. wants to start printing an obscene amount of money and give up on its national debt problem. It also sets the military on the path of executing missions the U.S. military shouldn’t be doing in the first place (do we really need thousands of U.S. troops in big Iraqi bases, dodging missile attacks every few weeks?). It also avoids the harder question of applying limited means to critical strategic interests.
Unfortunately, in the nation’s capital, very few seem to care.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
