As had been previously reported late last week, President Trump has unveiled a budget plan which, in addition to cutting social spending across the board, would seek a huge increase in military spending, centered almost entirely on war funding.
US military spending is always by far the largest on the planet, several
times the amount of the next highest spending, China. But while other
nations like China and Russia are scaling back their budgets, the
Pentagon’s budget, as ever, continues to rise.
Trump’s proposal would bring the overall defense budget for 2020 to $750
billion. This includes a $544 billion base-line defense budget, which
is not in and of itself a huge increase. But on top of that will be a nearly $100 billion in the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) Fund,
and a $9 billion “emergency” funding request meant to make up for the
money already taken from the military to build the border wall.
Using the OCO budget as an avenue for driving military spending up has
been a common tactic in recent decades, though it had fallen out of
favor in the past few years. The OCO has been heavily criticized because
its nature makes it effectively a black hole, allowing the Pentagon to
shuffle money around to different projects as it sees fit.
Exploding the OCO, nearly tripling it from the current year’s levels,
while keeping base funding roughly in line, seems meant to allow the
administration to present themselves as keeping past commitments, while
fueling a precipitous spending increase all the same.
White House Proposes Huge Increase in War Funding
Plan adds nearly $100 billion just to overseas operations fund
Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.
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