Progressives Are Going to Hate This Year’s Defense Spending Bill – By Dan Spinelli (Mother Jones) / April 16 2020
The coronavirus pandemic could have been a moment to rethink the Pentagon’s priorities. But it probably won’t be.
Few things are clear about next year’s defense spending authorization bill—when Congress will be able to debate it, when it will be approved, when President Donald Trump might sign it. The only certainty, at a time when the coronavirus crisis has upended almost every known quantity in Washington, is that progressive Democrats are going to hate this legislation.
Every spring, Congress puts together a mammoth bill that is supposed to authorize the Defense Department’s spending for the next fiscal year, but usually contains dozens of unrelated amendments that help shape the federal government’s national security policy. For decades, lawmakers passed the bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act—or NDAA—with strong bipartisan majorities and avoided prolonged debates over controversial policy matters.
That changed last year when the progressive flank of the House Democratic caucus pushed to include amendments limiting Trump’s ability to spend Pentagon funds on his border wall, preventing him from starting a war with Iran without congressional approval, and ending American support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, among other things. None of those provisions made it into the compromise bill, which emerged after negotiations with the Republican-controlled Senate. In the end, progressives were left feeling discouraged.
This year’s debate originally presented an appealing opportunity for progressives in the House to extract concessions from Senate Republicans. Nearly every major Democratic presidential candidate has spent months calling for a rethinking of American national security strategy, which has been dominated by endless wars in the Middle East. Even Joe Biden—the presumptive nominee, who is distrusted by many on the left—acknowledged to Military Times that the Pentagon “can maintain a strong defense and protect our safety and security for less.” Meanwhile, the Center for International Policy’s Sustainable Defense Task Force—composed of former government budget analysts, retired military leaders, and other experts—determined that the United States could save at least $1.25 trillion over the next decade by trimming the size of the military by 10 percent, eliminating waste and redundant positions, and halting the Trump administration’s massive investment in nuclear weapons.
Continue to article: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/ndaa-coronavirus-pentagon-pandemic/
