Despite a $1 Trillion Pentagon Budget, Our Veterans Are Being Neglected

This year, for the first time, the Pentagon’s budget topped $1 trillion. We’re told this is to “support the troops.” Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. While tens of thousands of veterans are homeless and hundreds of thousands are going hungry the Pentagon is wasting billions on things like $1,500 coffee cups and $150,000 on soap dispensers.

More than half of the Defense Department’s budget goes to private companies, not to military personnel. Those Pentagon contractors spend our taxpayer dollars to help pay for things like $20 million-plus CEO salaries, more than a thousand lobbyists, and multi-billion-dollar stock buy backs that artificially inflate the value of their shares, but do nothing to actually keep Americans safe, let alone, “support the troops.” While weapons contractor executives get rich–and buy the multi-million dollar mansions to prove it–military personnel are literally going hungry, with an estimated 25% facing food insecurity that has been exacerbated by the government shutdown.

Moises Montalvo, a veteran from Nebraska, has observed that for many people returning from America’s wars “hunger happens more often than not” and many vets grapple “every day” with the choice of “cutting food to yourself so you can feed your children.”

Then there is the impact of serving in the post-9/11 wars on the lives and health of veterans. More than 7,000 service members died in America’s post-9/11 wars, and an astonishing 600,000 suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) or traumatic brain injuries (TBI).