Remember Build Back Better? Way back in December, President Biden and advocates across a wide spectrum of issues fought to fund the president's signature plan, which included major new invvestments in clean energy, child care and preschool, health care, and financial help for struggling families. It ultimately failed due to one Senator's claimed...

U.S. and NATO miltiary spending totaling nearly $1.2 trillion - more than 17 times as much as Russia spent - failed to dissuade Putin's aggression toward Ukraine. The U.S. alone spent 12 times as much as Russia. 

The budget deal announced today continues a longstanding trend of overfunding the military and underfunding domestic and human needs, providing $782 billion for the miltiary and only $730 billion for domestic priorities. 

President Biden called for major new investments in people, communities, and infrastructure in his State of the Union address. But his calls fly in the face of the real spending patterns in this country, where military spending is routinely larger than spending on early childhood education, public K-12 education, job training, housing, public health, and medical and scientific research combined.

It’s unconscionable to pour more money into the Pentagon while the country comes apart at the seams. There’s still time for the Biden administration to pull back and stop the endless spending, just as it made a major step toward ending our endless wars.

As usual, there are no military solutions, and a heap of other dire problems are being relegated to lower priority status in the meantime. It’s time for the U.S. to evolve - to look for diplomatic solutions, and start to address all of the world’s problems.

What if you wanted less child poverty, better health care, more help with child care and elder care, and at least a gesture toward a solution to the climate crisis? And what if instead you got a $778 billion check for war profiteering?

Source: Chart by National Priorities Project, data from USAspending.gov.  As Democrats negotiate the Build Back Better bill from $3.5 trillion (over ten years) down to $1.75 trillion over ten years, priorities like paid leave, free community college, and Medicare expansion for affordable prescriptions, dental, and vision care are all on...

Today the Congressional Budget Office released a new report, “Illustrative Options for National Defense Under a Smaller Defense Budget,” that outlines three different options for cutting funding for the Department of Defense by $1 trillion, or 14 percent, over the next ten years. 

This week the House of Representatives is voting on the National Defense Authorization Act, the piece of legislation that sets the nation's military policy, and military budget. And, based on actions taken so far by the House Armed Services Committee, the House is positioned to approve nearly $780 billion in military spending. 

That's unless an effort to pass an amendment co-sponsored by Representative Barbara Lee and Representative Mark Pocan to cut the Pentagon budget by ten percent passes.