
According to anonymous sources, President Joe Biden will ask Congress to allocate $770,000,000,000 for defense in fiscal year 2023. as first reported by Reuters.
This would be at least $17 billionHigher than the defense budget requested for 2022 by the Biden administration, which was already enormous. Biden’s request is also much higher than the $740 billionTrump requested 2021 and the $639 billionTrump requested 2018 in his first year of office.
Sources said that officials are still working out the final amount. This could mean that the budget could change in the coming months. The budget for the Pentagon is roughly in line with what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has requested, and the overall budget would be used for salaries, nuclear weapons programs, tanks and Lockheed Martin’s F-35 aircraft.
The benefit would also go to defense contractors Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics Corp., and others. Reuters reported.
One source claimed that $770 billion is already a high amount, but the budget could be even more if it is passed by Congress later in 2019. In fact, Congress ended up with $770 billion in 2021 Adding several billion on top of Biden’s request for fiscal year 2022, bringing the total to a whopping $778 billion.
While the defense budget balloons, the rest of Biden’s agenda Has died in the SenateDue to concerns of so-called budget-hawks claiming that $350 million per year for vital social spending to rescue many lower- and mid-income Americans from financial ruin, as progressives suggested in Build Back Better Act, it is too costly.
With billions of dollars in the budget, provisions to address actual national threats such as the climate crisis were also put on hold. renewable technologiesOther measures left in limbo because of conservative Democrats’ rejectionThe Build Back Better Bill.
The Pentagon will receive hundreds upon billions of dollars in the proposed budget. Never oncePassed an audit and is now a history of losing track of hundreds of millions of dollars. The country is not currently engaged in any wars. though rampant U.S. militarismIt continues to be a problem all over the globe. Meanwhile, a huge portion of the budgetPrivate defense contractors will likely also end up with the funds. make billionsIn profits each year.
In the 20 years since 9/11, the United States has spent $21 trillion on military construction at home and abroad.
$21 trillion could have funded nationwide renewables, millions of jobs, erased student debt, and more—but instead, just caused suffering around the world.
In war, no one wins.
— Institute for Policy Studies (@IPS_DC) February 16, 2022
The news comes just after the Biden administration announced, in the wake of the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, that it is freezing $7 billion of the country’s frozen reserves that are held in U.S. banks and redistributing half of them to 9/11 victims rather than giving them to Afghan families in need. The U.S. A direct roleAdvocacy groups condemned the decision as it led to humanitarian crises in Afghanistan. Progressives are not Afghan. like Rep. Ilhan Omar, have noted that “Even if this weren’t the case, punishing millions of starving people] for these crimes is unconscionable.”
“This decision is short sighted, cruel, and will serve to worsen a catastrophe in progress, affecting millions of Afghans, many of whom are on the verge of starvation,” Afghans For A Better Tomorrow said. “Let us be clear: all of the $7.1 billion in reserves belongs, rightfully, to the people of Afghanistan and ought to be used to allow the Central Bank of Afghanistan (or Da Afghanistan Bank, DAB) to perform its basic functions.”
The news of the possible budget request is also reported.he escalating Ukraine-Russia conflictUnresolved. Tuesday, Biden said that he plans to approach the situation with diplomacy, but also said that the U.S. is “ready to respond decisively” in the event of an attack. Public intellectual Noam Chomsky has observed that the U.S. has already been “vigorously fanning the flames” of conflict.