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. 

For just a fraction of what we’ve spent on militarization these last 20 years, we could start to make life much better.

In 2020, the Pentagon budgeted $18.6 billion for its Afghanistan operations. That level of investment could pay up-front refugee relocation costs of $15,148 for 1.2 million people.

With the Afghanistan War finally ending, we shouldn’t squander our “peace dividend” on costly weapons or military bloat.

President Biden proposed a Pentagon budget increase larger than the entire discretionary budget of the CDC.

With his Pentagon budget proposal last week, President Biden made clear his intention to continue in the footsteps of President Trump. The proposal called for an increase in Pentagon and war spending from $740 billion fiscal year 2021 to $753 billion in fiscal year 2022. 

Progressives have called for an immediate ten percent Pentagon spending reduction, to be followed by greater reductions. That would take spending closer to where it was under President Obama. We'll soon find out whether President Biden will stick with the Trump increases, build on them, or begin to tear them down.

We’ve had 18 years to learn that the costs of war are just too high. We must end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the next time our leaders inevitably argue for the necessity of war, it’s up to us to resist.