Same as It Ever Was

The military calls, and Congress answers.

Gerard Bottino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

We are living through turbulent times in history: a global network of proxy wars, political violence, targeted killings, shakeups to political norms and wide shifts in the electorate. But some things stay the same, like the United States’ gargantuan military budget.

From ABC:

National defense would see a 1% increase in spending this fiscal year under a Pentagon policy bill that also gives a double-digit pay raise to about half of the enlisted service members in the military.

The measure is traditionally strongly bipartisan, but not this year as some Democratic lawmakers protest the inclusion of a ban on transgender medical treatments for children of military members if such treatment could result in sterilization.

The bill is expected to pass the House Wednesday and then move to the Senate, where lawmakers had sought a bigger boost in defense spending than the $895.2 billion authorized in the compromise measure before them.

It’s good that there are some Democratic lawmakers who are pushing back against the ban on gender affirming care for military dependents. But if that is their only reservation to a nearly $900 billion military budget, then it’s just another indication that the status quo in the United States is not changing anytime soon.

The problems with this prioritization of American tax dollars are endless, and the criticism come easy. (It’s tempting, for instance, to joke about Trump’s proposed “Department of Government Efficiency,” but that assumes that DOGE is actually about what it says it’s for and not just funneling federal money into privatized industries.) What it says to me, rather, is that it’s far too soon to hope that the political upheaval of a second Trump administration will provoke any large-scale adjustment of the average politician’s political sensibilities. They believe in the good of the American Empire — and in a few short years, it may be all we have left.

I am sure that Democrats in Congress and the Senate will organize all kinds of legislative resistance to the Trump trifecta — some of it, perhaps, will even be useful. But year after year, they’ll keep voting for the same defense budget. They’ll vote for it as far right elements of our country and government erode their power to resist in any way. They’ll vote for it as the military budget itself is further funneled toward private defense contractors and away from the actual people who serve. (It’s worth noting that the justification for the increase in the budget year-over-year, this year at least, is to bring junior enlisted members’ salaries up to a level that’s competitive with the private sector, or in simpler terms to a level where families on base aren’t having to use food stamps — as if the military couldn’t have found room for those increases anywhere else in the over $800 billion they got last year.) Meanwhile, with a Republican trifecta looming, the bill also includes fun little nuggets like this:

On Israel, the bill, among other things, includes an expansion of U.S. joint military exercises with Israel and a prohibition on the Pentagon citing casualty data from Hamas.

These are line items in a sprawling, gargantuan bill. But they’re things that only get token resistance — in the case of the gender-affirming care — when they’re so clearly politically brutal that a few lawmakers decide it’s in their best interests to speak up. And yet the bills will pass, with much of this language included, because that is what we do here. That’s what this country does.

For so long we have built the myth of America around our strong military, and now, when we need change most of all, that will be the pillar that even the liberals still in office cling to as the building crumbles around them. Same as it ever was. Pump out the guns, prop up the killers, flex our might until there is nothing left.