Floor Speech - Sanders: Cut the Pentagon By 10% to Hire More Teachers, Build More Homes, and Create More Jobs
Floor Speech
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, if there was ever a moment in American history to fundamentally alter our national priorities, now is the time.
Whether it is fighting against systemic racism and police brutality, transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel, ending a cruel and dysfunctional healthcare system, or addressing the grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality in our country, now is the time for change--real change.
When we talk about real change, it is incredible to me the degree to which Congress continues to ignore our bloated $740 billion defense budget, which has gone up by over $100 billion since Trump has been in office.
Year after year, Democrats and Republicans--who disagree on almost everything--come together with minimal debate to support an exploding Pentagon budget, which is now higher than the next 11 countries combined--now higher than the next 11 countries combined--and which represents more than half of our discretionary spending.
Incredibly, after adjusting for inflation, we are now spending more on the military than we did during the height of the Cold War, when we faced a major adversary in the Soviet Union, or during the wars in Vietnam and Korea.
This extraordinary level of military spending comes at a time when the Department of Defense is the only agency of our Federal Government that has not been able to pass an independent audit, when defense contractors are making enormous profits, while paying their CEOs exorbitant compensation packages, and when the so-called War on Terror will end up costing us some $6 trillion.
I believe this is a moment in history where it would be a very good idea for all of my colleagues and the American people to remember what former Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1953. As we all recall, Eisenhower was a four-star general who led the Allied Forces to victory in Europe during World War II. He knew something about war and defense spending. Eisenhower said, and I quote--and this is a profound statement we should never forget--Eisenhower said:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone, it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
What Eisenhower said was profoundly true 67 years ago, and it is profoundly true today.
If the horrific pandemic we are now experiencing has taught us anything, it is that national security is not just building bombs, missiles, jet fighters, tanks, submarines, nuclear warheads, and other weapons of mass destruction; national security also means doing everything we can to improve the lives of our people, many of whom have been abandoned by our government decade after decade.
In order to begin the process of transforming our national priorities, I have filed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act with Senator Markey of Massachusetts to reduce the military budget by 10 percent and to use the $74 billion in savings to invest in distressed communities all across our country--communities that have been ravaged by extreme poverty, mass incarceration, deindustrialization, and decades of neglect.
At a time when more Americans have died from the coronavirus than were killed fighting in World War I; when over 30 million Americans have lost their jobs in recent months--30 million; when tens of millions of Americans are in danger of being evicted from their apartments or their homes because they no longer have adequate income; when education in America--from childcare to graduate school--is in desperate need of reform; when half a million Americans are homeless tonight; and when close to 100 million of our people are either uninsured or underinsured, now is the time to invest in our people--in jobs, education, housing, healthcare here at home--not more military spending for an already bloated military budget. Now is the time to get our priorities right.
Under this amendment, distressed communities in every State in our country would be able to use this $74 billion in funding to create jobs by building affordable housing desperately needed in our country, by investing in schools when school budgets all over America are in desperate shape, investing in childcare facilities, community health centers, public hospitals, libraries, sustainable energy projects, and clean drinking water facilities.
These communities will also receive Federal funding to hire more public school teachers, provide nutritious meals to our children, and offer free tuition at public colleges, universities, or trade schools.
Mr. President, at this pivotal moment in American history, we have to rethink our Nation's priorities, and we have to make a fundamental decision about who we are as a people.
Do we really want to spend billions more on endless wars in the Middle East, or do we want to provide good-paying jobs to millions of unemployed Americans at home as we rebuild our communities? Do we want to spend more money on nuclear weapons, or do we want to invest in childcare and healthcare for the American people who need it the most?
When we take a close look at the Defense Department budget--I am sorry to say that I don't think we are doing that here in the Senate--it is interesting to note that Congress has appropriated so much money for the Defense Department that the Pentagon literally does not know what to do with it. Children go hungry in America, people sleep out on the streets, young people can't afford to go to college, but the Defense Department literally does not know what to do with all of the money Congress throws at it.
According to the Government Accountability Office--the GAO--between 2013 and 2018, the Pentagon returned more than $80 billion in funding back to the Treasury. They couldn't spend the money that they had.
In my view, the time is long overdue for us to take a hard look not only at the size of the Pentagon budget but at the enormous amount of waste, cost overruns, fraud, and at the financial mismanagement that has plagued the Department of Defense for decades.
Let's be clear. About half of the Pentagon's budget goes directly into the hands of private contractors, not our troops. And I think I share the view with every Member of the Senate that we must protect our troops. I don't want troops and their families on food stamps. I don't want to see our military living in inadequate housing or lacking childcare for their kids. We must make sure that our men and women in the Armed Forces have as good a quality of life as we can provide. But let's again not forget that about half of the Pentagon's budget goes directly into the hands of private contractors, not the troops.
Over the past two decades, virtually every major defense contractor in the United States has paid millions of dollars in fines and settlements for misconduct and fraud, all while making huge profits on those government contracts.
Since 1995, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and United Technology--some of the major defense contractors in America--have paid over $3 billion in fines or related settlements for fraud or misconduct--over $3 billion in fines or related settlements for fraud or misconduct. Yet those three companies received around $1 trillion in defense contracts over the past two decades alone.
I find it interesting that the very same defense contractors that have been found guilty or reached settlements for fraud are also paying their CEOs excessive compensation packages. Last year, the CEOs of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman both made over $20 million in total compensation, while 90 percent of the company's revenue came from defense contracts. In other words, these companies--and it is important to note, and we don't talk about this often--for all intents and purposes, these companies are governmental agencies. They are receiving over 90 percent of their revenue from the Federal Government. Yes, they are private corporations, but they are essentially subsidiaries of the Federal Government. Yet, despite receiving over 90 percent of their funding from the taxpayers of this country, they are paying their CEOs over 100 times more than the Secretary of Defense makes. And the Secretary of Defense does just fine, but the CEOs, on government revenue of the major defense companies, earn 100 times more than the Secretary of Defense. It is not, therefore, very surprising to learn
that we have a revolving door where our generals and admirals and other officials in the military leave government service and then end up on the boards of directors of these major defense companies.
Moreover, as the GAO has told us, there are massive, massive cost overruns in the Defense Department's acquisition budget that the U.S. Congress must address. According to the GAO, the Pentagon's $1.8 trillion acquisition portfolio currently suffers from more than $628 billion in cost overruns, with much of the costs taking place after production.
In other words, they tell the government--they tell the DOD that they will produce a weapons system for X dollars. It doesn't mean much because the total amount ends up being Y after they get the contract.
The GAO tells us also that ``many DOD programs fall short of costs, schedule and performance expectations, meaning the DOD pays more than anticipated, can buy less than expected, and in some cases delivers less capability to the warfighter.''
The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded in 2011, and $31 to $60 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan has been lost to fraud and waste--$31 to $60 billion. Separately, in 2015, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that the Pentagon could not account for $45 billion in funding for reconstruction projects. It just got lost. A few bucks here, a few bucks there? No, $45 billion of taxpayer money was lost and cannot be accounted for. More recently, an audit conducted by Ernst & Young for the Defense Logistics Agency found that the DOD could not properly account for some $800 million in construction projects. That is what happens when you have a huge agency that is truly unaccountable.
I believe in a strong military, but we cannot keep giving more money to the Pentagon than it needs when millions of children in our country are food insecure, when 140 million Americans cannot afford the basic necessities of life without going into debt, throwing billions after billions into the Pentagon and a few blocks away from here, in the Nation's Capital, people are sleeping out in the streets, children can't find a decent education, and young people can't afford to go to college.
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned us that ``a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.''
Let me repeat that.
Dr. King said that ``a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.''
The time is long overdue for the U.S. Senate to listen to what Dr. King said. At a time when, in the richest country in the history of the world, half of our people are struggling paycheck-to-paycheck; when over 40 million Americans are living in poverty; and when over 500,000 Americans are homeless, to quote Dr. King, we are approaching spiritual death.
At a time when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost every major country on Earth and when millions of Americans are in danger of going hungry, we are approaching spiritual death.
At a time when over 60,000 Americans die unnecessarily every year because they can't afford to go to a doctor when they need to go to a doctor and when one out of five Americans cannot afford the prescription drugs their doctors prescribe, yes, we are approaching spiritual death.
Now, at this moment of unprecedented national crisis, it is time to rethink what we value as a society and to fundamentally transform our national priorities. The status quo is no longer good enough. Now, at this moment of national crises, a growing pandemic and economic meltdown, the demand to end systemic racism and police brutality, and an unstable President, it is time for us to truly focus on what we value as a society and to fundamentally transform our national priorities. Cutting the military budget by 10 percent and investing that money in human needs is a modest way to begin that process.
With that, I yield the floor.
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