Lisa Desjardins:
Listen, we have been talking about all the trillions in this bill. A billion dollars is still a lot of money. And when I read this bill, I saw billions and billions going to the Defense Department. That’s something Republicans like.
But it’s something that’s important to watch because a lot of this funding is usually day in, day out funding. It’s almost like an emergency grant to the Defense Department. So I want to take a look at what the defense funding is in this bill, more than 200 projects I saw. You see some of them there, billions for new submarines and ships, missile defense.
There’s a big category called readiness that is not defined. It really just seems like billions that the Pentagon can spend as they want, A.I., war games, weapons, F-22s, which the Pentagon has often said they don’t want to spend money on. Congress is again saying they must, and $1 billion on border enforcement, in total, $150 billion.
This is a very large, maybe one of the largest sort of supplemental appropriations for the Defense Department. But, again, Republicans love it. But when this time of budget cut is coming, it’s important to know what they’re doing here is trying to protect the Pentagon from future budget cuts in this bill that’s not a military bill.
