Several academics, politicians and advocates have condemned the US Senate's passage this week of a foreign funding bill that would provide billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, while US social programs They need financing.
It is unclear when – or even if – the House of Representatives will vote on the measure, which includes $9 billion in international humanitarian assistance, some of which could go to besieged Palestinians in Gaza.
But in approving the $95 billion emergency relief package by a 70-29 margin on Tuesday, analysts say the Senate articulated the Capitol's long-standing prioritization of guns over housing, health care, education and debt relief.
Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Al Jazeera she had “extreme concerns” about the total amount of the Senate legislation.
“At $95 billion, this is a significant increase in the US federal budget and a significant commitment of resources to the war,” he said.
“There are huge discrepancies as to where resources are allocated.”
This week on social media, some observers also denounced the foreign aid bill, invoking a lyric by the late rapper Tupac Shakur: “I got money for war, but I can't feed the poor.”
'Biased priorities'
The Senate bill (PDF) provides $60 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine and $14.1 billion in security assistance to Israel, among other things.
Money for ammunition amounts to “throwing good money after bad,” according to critics of the legislation. House Speaker Mike Johnson has suggested that he will not allow the relief package to come to the House floor for a vote, as he had demanded immigration reform as part of the legislative package.
Since former President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration in the 1960s escalated the war in Vietnam and derailed the War on Poverty program, the federal government has increasingly reduced social spending while dedicating increasing proportions of its general budget to militarized programs.
According to a May report from the National Priorities Project, 62 percent of the federal discretionary budget ($1.1 trillion) went to these programs in fiscal year 2023.
Instead, “less than $2 of every $5 of federal discretionary spending was available to fund investments in people and communities,” including public education, housing and child care, among other social programs.
“We must invest in humanity, both at home and abroad. “Congress must stop funneling taxpayer dollars into endless wars and invest in the housing, health, education and social programs our communities need,” Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush tweeted Tuesday after the Senate bill passed. .
We must invest in humanity, both at home and abroad. Congress must stop funneling taxpayer dollars into endless wars and invest in the housing, health, education and social programs our communities need. pic.twitter.com/3Fdy9cs4Sc
— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) February 13, 2024
In particular, the Senate's decision to funnel more military aid to Israel as it continues to bomb the Gaza Strip has fueled widespread criticism and raised questions about priorities on Capitol Hill.
“In a situation where the International Court of Justice has said that genocide may be occurring [in Gaza]“The Senate’s decision to approve sending $14 billion in weapons to Israel makes the United States a more direct accomplice,” said Mike Merryman-Lotze, director of Global Just Peace Policy at the American Friends Service Committee.
William Hartung, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an expert on U.S. military budgets, also said that overall, “even by Washington standards, $95 billion is a lot of money.”
Passage of the Senate bill, Hartung wrote in Forbes on Wednesday, “exposes the federal government's skewed priorities.”
“Despite deep divisions, it is possible to gain bipartisan support for a package that primarily involves financing arms exports. “Don’t expect any such emergency measures to address record levels of homelessness, help the one in six American children living in poverty, or accelerate investments to curb the climate crisis,” he said.
A boost to employment?
Biden has argued that bipartisan legislation is critical to America's national security interests and sends a clear message that his administration continues to support its allies. The bill will also boost the American economy by creating jobs, according to the president.
“While this bill sends military equipment to Ukraine, it spends the money right here in the United States of America, in places like Arizona, where Patriot missiles are built; and Alabama, where Javelin missiles are built; and Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas, where artillery shells are manufactured,” Biden said in a speech at the White House on Tuesday.
“And the way it works is that we supply Ukraine with military equipment from our reserves, and then we spend our money to replenish those reserves so that our military has access to them, reserves that are manufactured here in the United States by American workers,” he said. .
“That not only supports American jobs and communities, but allows us to invest in maintaining and strengthening our own defense manufacturing capabilities.”
But research has shown that other types of government spending would do more to boost employment than what one researcher described (PDF) as Washington's pattern of “feeding one wolf—the militarized economy—to the detriment of others.”
Heidi Peltier, a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs and program director of the Costs of War project, wrote in a June report that military spending supports 6.1 jobs per million dollars spent.
By comparison, the report found that healthcare creates 11.6 jobs per million dollars (nearly double), while a $1 million investment in primary and secondary education creates 21 jobs, more than triple. The same investment in wind and solar energy would also create between nine and 14 percent more jobs.
Best uses for $95 billion
According to Koshgarian of the Institute for Policy Studies, there are plenty of ways $95 billion could be better used to support Americans, from funding programs that address child poverty and education to addressing housing affordability issues.
He noted, for example, that a critical federal nutrition program for women, infants and children – known as WIC – faces a billion-dollar funding gap. “It's an incredibly important program, there are a lot of families that have depended on it,” she said. “It would be easy to find a billion dollars to make up the shortfall.”
The United States is also not meeting its climate resilience and green economy goals, Koshgarian told Al Jazeera, and the public is “constantly told that we don't have the funds to fully pay for those programs.”
Greater investments in programs like these, he added, “will pay off in multiple ways in the future for the people of this country, in a way that investing in wars abroad [doesn’t]”.
“When the United States invests in war elsewhere, it simply perpetuates those instabilities, and it is not a cycle that can end by simply investing in militarism over and over again.”
Merryman-Lotze of the American Friends Service Committee also said $95 billion would be better spent on national priorities, such as the environment and education.
And if the United States really wants to address the root causes of conflicts abroad, it might as well do better than spending money on weapons, he added.
“America's approach to conflicts and problems is highly militarized, whether it's how we respond to crime at home through policing and prisons, or we respond to conflicts abroad by resorting to military force,” Merryman-Lotze said. Al Jazeera.
“The first thing we turn to in most cases is the army, the police, violence and weapons. “This is how our system has been built for decades, and we need to break that addiction to the idea that force is the way to achieve security.”
