$150 Billion for Pentagon Contractors, Including Possibly Musk’s SpaceX, Is Unconscionable
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The House Armed Services Committee today marked up and passed its version of the federal reconciliation bill put forward by the House GOP and President Trump, which greenlights $150 billion in additional Pentagon spending on top of the most recently passed annual budget. Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, released the following statement:
“Despite strong objection from discerning members of the committee, the House Armed Services Committee in its reconciliation markup proposes to shower a mind-boggling $150 billion in extra spending on the grotesquely bloated and wasteful Pentagon today. The Pentagon’s budget already gobbles up half of the nation’s discretionary spending and reliably fails every single audit it ever undergoes, hardly making it a candidate for more spending by those who purport to care about ‘efficiency.’
“While Elon Musk has been busy slashing the rest of the federal government and calling his destruction ‘efficiency,’ his company SpaceX is preparing to bid on President Trump’s wasteful, dangerous and technologically infeasible ‘Golden Dome.’ The reconciliation package contemplates spending tens of billions on this monstrosity; the overall costs will likely total in the hundreds of billions. Efficiency, indeed.
“Making this enormous spending on warfighting still more unconscionable, in the reconciliation bill it will be directly traded off against healthcare, nutrition, and other human needs spending. This is literally a choice of guns over butter. In a nation that spends as much on the military as the next nine highest spending nations, lawmakers are proposing to spend more on weapons while cutting health insurance for tens of millions.”