Americans Want to Reinvest Ten Percent of the Military Budget Against Coronavirus

By Ashik Siddique

For years, boosting the military budget has been a bipartisan priority in Congress, with little accountability for how that money is spent. The same lawmakers in both parties often raise the specter of budget deficits to fear-monger against investments in urgent, popular priorities like heading off climate chaos through a Green New Deal, or expanding healthcare with Medicare for All.

That’s why, in 2020, the United States spends 53 percent of its discretionary budget on the military — more than the next 10 biggest spenders combined. The current military budget of $738 billion is higher than at any point since World War II, except at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s more than all federal spending on public health, education, housing, and renewable energy combined, while our society strains under the stresses of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and growing economic crisis.

This week, progressives in the House and Senate are sticking a wedge in the works of the military-industrial budget process. Representatives Mark Pocan, Barbara Lee, and Pramila Jayapal, and Senators Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, and Elizabeth Warren have introduced amendments to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would reinvest 10 percent of the Pentagon budget in meeting critical human needs.

As it turns out, this is popular with a majority of voters across the political spectrum. 

A new Data for Progress poll run from July 15 through July 16 found that 56 percent of likely voters support cutting the military budget by 10 percent to pay for priorities like fighting the coronavirus, education, healthcare, and housing. Only 27 percent were opposed.

 
 

That supportive majority includes half of Republicans, against 37 percent opposed to this reinvestment — a remarkable divergence from the Republicans elected to Congress, none of whom are on record as supporting this amendment as of this writing.

There’s a straightforward conservative case for reining in federal spending on the Pentagon, the world’s largest bureaucracy. Even setting aside deficit concerns, the Pentagon does not meet any reasonable standard of fiscal responsibility. It has failed repeated comprehensive audits in recent years, and one internal study exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in the Department of Defense.

A 10 percent cut could easily be structured to leave untouched anything in the military budget that actually supports the troops, like pay, healthcare, and benefits for military personnel. More than half of the military budget goes to private contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon, which profit from the threat of war, and then deliver the lion’s share of their profits to CEOs. In 2018, Lockheed Martin's CEO took home $20 million, while the lowest-ranked enlisted soldiers got just $20,000.

The progressive case for reinvesting Pentagon funds is even more obvious. Two decades after 9/11, the dramatic expansion of America’s military footprint around the world has cost $6.4 trillion and hundreds of thousands of deaths, while destabilizing civil society in many nations, increasing hostilities against the United States, and failing to achieve clear lasting objectives except lining the pockets of contractors. 

More money for the military means more likelihood of violence — when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That has clearly been the case with the Trump administration’s repeated threats to use militarized force abroad, and increasingly against this country’s own people. And yet, while bemoaning the president’s belligerence, many Democrats have consistently rubber-stamped this administration’s military budget increases for several years in a row.

Americans are ready to change course. Previous Data for Progress polling found support for a progressive overhaul of U.S. foreign policy, rejecting predominant fear-based framing in favor of a demilitarized agenda focused on international cooperation, human rights, and peace-building. Funding for diplomacy and foreign aid currently pales in comparison to the bloated military budget — redirecting any fraction of it would go a long way toward repairing the harmful legacy of US military interventions around the world.

War hawks often tout the military’s role as a job creator and poverty reducer, but at a time of widespread unemployment, it’s perverse that the Pentagon is effectively this country’s largest public jobs program. A study from Brown University found that, dollar for dollar, public investment in the military creates fewer jobs than spending in other sectors like education, health care, and clean energy. 

Ten percent of the Pentagon budget would make a massive difference to any number of social priorities that currently receive fractions of the Pentagon’s federal funding.

When asked to choose three top priorities from among seven options for where they would like to see 10 percent of the military budget reallocated in the recent Data for Progress poll, 40 percent of voters chose coronavirus response, and 37 percent chose healthcare in general.

 
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10 percent of the military budget would go a long way toward expanding the capacity of America’s healthcare system to contain and treat coronavirus. While many regions of the U.S. still lack coronavirus testing capacity amid a new surge of cases, $74 billion would be enough to offer six free tests to every one of the 330 million people in the country. Or it could buy enough N95 face masks for each one of the 55 million essential workers to use one a day for more than a year, or pay for the next 6 months of hospital stays for coronavirus patients at the high end of current national forecasts, an estimated 13,000 new hospitalizations per day.

Of the remaining options, between 13 to 18 percent of voters chose housing, clean energy, climate change, education, or poverty reduction among their top three. On any of these fronts, $74 billion would have a dramatic impact. 

That’s more than enough to end homelessness, assuming a high-end cost estimate of $30,000 to house each one of the more than half a million people who were experiencing homelessness in this country last year — a number that’s likely to grow as millions more face evictions in this current economic crisis. 

$74 billion could deploy enough renewable energy to power almost every one of the 128 million households in the U.S., or create enough well-paying green jobs to transition nearly every one of the 1.1 million workers in the traditional coil, oil, and gas sectors.

$74 billion could hire 900,000 new public elementary school teachers, increasing the current work force by 50 percent at a time when many schools are struggling to figure out how to safely reopen in the fall. It’s more than enough to close the $23 billion racial funding gap between majority-white and majority non-white school districts.

It’s worth putting this proposed 10 percent cut in context: the Pentagon budget was about 20 percent lower just four years ago during the Obama administration. Even larger reinvestments could make us all safer. Last year, the National Priorities Project and Poor People’s Campaign laid out a proposal to shave up to $350 billion off the military budget, a goal that Rep. Barbara Lee advanced last month with 19 cosponsors. That would bring spending down to about $400 billion per year, in keeping with Pentagon spending during much of the 1970s and 1990s — and still leave the U.S. with a clear advantage over any possible adversaries, with a bigger military budget than China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea combined.

Even before coronavirus, there was a strong case to redirect Pentagon resources. Now, as the greatest economic crisis of our lifetimes continues to intensify, should be a time for greater reckoning. As people across the country rise up to demand the defunding and demilitarization of police, coupled with reinvestments in communities that have been disproportionately harmed by racist state violence, extraction, and pollution, it’s past due for more Americans to ask whether a similar analogy shouldn’t be made for the US military’s role in the world.

Redirecting 10 percent of the Pentagon budget to fund healthcare, kickstart a Green New Deal jobs recovery, or reinforce public housing and education is a simple, sensible step in the right direction — away from metastasizing military expansion, and toward healing a society reeling from coronavirus. 

The major challenges flaring up today are not ones with militarized solutions. They demand strong public investment in community well-being and resilient infrastructure. 

Most people in the U.S. agree. This week, members of Congress should vote to follow their lead.


Authorship & Methodology

Ashik Siddique (@ahsheek) is a researcher focused on the federal budget and military spending with the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (@natpriorities).

From July 15 through July 16, 2020, Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1,235 likely voters nationally using web-panel respondents. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, and voting history. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error is +/- 2.8 percentage points.