With big publicity around efforts to cut government spending, we’ll find out whether the incoming administration and Congress are willing to hold the Pentagon accountable. 

While the larger budgets makes some important strides forward, this discretionary proposal won’t provide security we need, in terms of costs of living, quality of life, climate change, or securing peace.

The $118 billion bill that Senate leaders put forward this week is a deal that never should have been made. 

There is an entity whose job it is to prevent this sort of abuse: Congress. With each failure at the Pentagon, Congress is failing, too.

An extra $105 billion in mostly military spending is no small matter, especially on top of the $886 billion military budget that has been working its way through Congress this year. So, how did this thing get so big?

The budget deal struck by the White House and House Republicans begins what could be a long-term shift in federal spending from domestic programs toward the Pentagon. 

Our tax dollars should make life better, not go to waste. But the average taxpayer had to shell out over $1,000 for military contractors alone last year.

The president’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year, released March 9, was heralded by human needs groups for preserving and in some cases expanding critical human needs programs to address poverty, hunger, health care, and protect children and seniors in particular. 

But as our chart shows, the Biden budget continues to fund the Pentagon and war at levels that far outpace all federal programs for housing, education, public health, and more.

Current military spending is higher than the height of military spending during the Reagan years at the height of the Cold War. Looking further back, the Biden request is higher than the height of the Vietnam or Korean wars, too. 

While more than half of the federal discretionary budget under the president’s proposal would go to the military, fully two-thirds would go to a combination of the military, veterans’ programs, and heavily militarized homeland security programs.