DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Spend, spend,
spend By Chris Hellman and
Mattea Kramer
Recent months have seen a
flurry of headlines about cuts (often called
"threats") to the United States defense budget.
Last week, lawmakers in the House of
Representatives even passed a bill that was meant
to spare national security spending from future
cuts by reducing school-lunch funding and other
social programs.
Here, then, is a simple
question that, for some curious reason, no one
bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we
spending on national security these days? With
major wars winding down, has Washington already
cut such spending so close to the bone that
further reductions would be perilous to our
safety?
In fact, with projected cuts added
in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013
will be nearly $1 trillion - a staggering enough
sum that it's worth taking a walk through the maze
of the national
security budget to see
just where that money's lodged.
If you've
heard a number for how much the US spends on the
military, it's probably in the neighborhood of
$530 billion. That's the Pentagon's base budget
for fiscal 2013, and represents a 2.5% cut from
2012. But that $530 billion is merely the
beginning of what the US spends on national
security. Let's dig a little deeper.
The
Pentagon's base budget doesn't include war
funding, which in recent years has been well over
$100 billion. With US troops withdrawn from Iraq
and troop levels falling in Afghanistan, you might
think that war funding would be plummeting as
well. In fact, it will drop to a mere $88 billion
in fiscal 2013. By way of comparison, the federal
government will spend around $64 billion on
education that same year.
Add in war
funding, and our national security total jumps to
$618 billion. And we're still just getting
started.
The US military maintains an
arsenal of nuclear weapons. You might assume that
we've already accounted for nukes in the
Pentagon's $530 billion base budget. But you'd be
wrong. Funding for nuclear weapons falls under the
Department of Energy (DOE), so it's a number you
rarely hear. In fiscal 2013, we'll be spending
$11.5 billion on weapons and related programs at
the DOE. And disposal of nuclear waste is
expensive, so add another $6.4 billion for weapons
cleanup.
Now, we're at $636 billion and
counting.
How about homeland security?
We've got to figure that in, too. There's the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which will
run taxpayers $35.5 billion for its national
security activities in fiscal 2013. But there's
funding for homeland security squirreled away in
just about every other federal agency as well.
Think, for example, about programs to secure the
food supply, funded through the US Department of
Agriculture. So add another $13.5 billion for
homeland security at federal agencies other than
DHS.
That brings our total to $685
billion.
Then there's the international
affairs budget, another obscure corner of the
federal budget that just happens to be jammed with
national security funds. For fiscal 2013, $8
billion in additional war funding for Iraq and
Afghanistan is hidden away there. There's also $14
billion for what's called "international security
assistance" - that's part of the weapons and
training Washington offers foreign militaries
around the world. Plus there's $2 billion for
"peacekeeping operations", money US taxpayers send
overseas to help fund military operations handled
by international organizations and our allies.
That brings our national security total up
to $709 billion.
We can't forget the cost
of caring for our nation's veterans, including
those wounded in our recent wars. That's an
important as well as hefty share of national
security funding. In 2013, veterans programs will
cost the federal government $138 billion.
That brings us to $847 billion - and we're
not done yet.
Taxpayers also fund pensions
and other retirement benefits for non-veteran
military retirees, which will cost $55 billion
next year. And then there are the retirement costs
for civilians who worked at the Department of
Defense and now draw pensions and benefits. The
federal government doesn't publish a number on
this, but based on the share of the federal
workforce employed at the Pentagon, we can
estimate that its civilian retirees will cost
taxpayers around $21 billion in 2013.
By
now, we've made it to $923 billion - and we're
finally almost done.
Just one more thing
to add in, a miscellaneous defense account that's
separate from the defense base budget. It's called
"defense-related activities" and it's got $8
billion in it for 2013.
That brings our
grand total to an astonishing $931 billion.
And this will turn out to be a
conservative figure. We won't spend less than
that, but among other things, it doesn't include
the interest we're paying on money we borrowed to
fund past military operations; nor does it include
portions of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration budget that are dedicated to
national security. And we don't know if this
number captures the entire intelligence budget or
not, because parts of intelligence funding are
classified.
For now, however, that
whopping $931 billion for fiscal year 2013 will
have to do. If our national security budget were
its own economy, it would be the 19th largest in
the world, roughly the size of Australia's.
Meanwhile, the country with the next largest
military budget, China, spends a mere pittance by
comparison. The most recent estimate puts China's
military funding at around $136 billion.
Or think of it this way: National security
accounts for one quarter of every dollar the
federal government is projected to spend in 2013.
And if you pull trust funds for programs like
social security out of the equation, that figure
rises to more than one third of every dollar in
the projected 2013 federal budget.
Yet the
House recently passed legislation to spare the
defense budget from cuts, arguing that the
automatic spending reductions scheduled for
January 2013 would compromise national security.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has said
such automatic cuts, which would total around $55
billion in 2013, would be "disastrous" for the
defense budget. To avoid them, the House would
instead pull money from the National School Lunch
Program, the Children's Health Insurance Program,
Medicaid, food stamps and programs like the Social
Services Block Grant, which funds Meals on Wheels,
among other initiatives.
Yet it wouldn't
be difficult to find savings in that $931 billion.
There's plenty of low-hanging fruit, starting with
various costly weapons systems left over from the
Cold War, like the Virginia class submarine, the
V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, the missile
defense program, and the most expensive weapons
system on the planet, the F-35 jet fighter.
Cutting back or canceling some of these programs
would save billions of dollars annually.
In fact, congress could find much deeper
savings, but it would require fundamentally
redefining national security in this country. On
this issue, the American public is already several
steps ahead of Washington. Americans
overwhelmingly think that national security
funding should be cut - deeply.
If
lawmakers don't pay closer attention to their
constituents, we already know the alternative:
pulling school-lunch funding.
Chris
Hellman and Mattea Kramer are research
analysts at the National Priorities Project. They
wrote the soon-to-be-published bookA
People's Guide to the Federal Budget, and host
weekly two-minute Budget Brief videos on YouTube.
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