The Trillion Dollar Pentagon Budget: Boondoggle or Beneficial?
In early July when the reconciliation bill was signed into law, the Pentagon’s budget exceeded $1 trillion dollars for the first time. In other words, the Pentagon now has a larger budget than it did at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Reagan military buildup, the Vietnam War, or at any time during the Cold War.
To understand if this enormous level of spending will be beneficial or just another Pentagon boondoggle, the Quincy Institute held a panel of leading Pentagon budget experts, including Julia Gledhill, a research analyst for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center; Veronique de Rugy, the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; and William D. Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute. Hartung is also co-author of the forthcoming Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home. Ben Freeman, fellow book author and director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, moderated the panel.
Program
Entities
Panelists
William Hartung
William D. Hartung focuses on the arms industry and US military budget. He was previously the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the co-director of the Center’s Sustainable Defense Task Force. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011) and the co-editor, with Miriam Pemberton, of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008). And Weapons for All (HarperCollins, 1995) is a critique of US arms sales policies from the Nixon through Clinton administrations. Bill previously directed programs at the New America Foundation and the World Policy Institute. He also worked as a speechwriter and policy analyst for New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams.
Julia Gledhill
Julia Gledhill is a research analyst for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center. She focuses her research and writing on Pentagon spending, military contracting, and weapon acquisition. In previous roles at the Project On Government Oversight and the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Julia worked on various national security issues related to Pentagon accountability, war powers, civilian protection, drones, torture, and the U.S. lethal strikes program. For her undergraduate thesis at Colorado College, Julia conducted an econometric study to test the relative impacts of various types of defense spending on income inequality in the United States
Veronique De Rugy
Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a nationally syndicated columnist. Her primary research interests include the US economy, the federal budget, taxation, tax competition, and cronyism. Her popular weekly columns address economic issues ranging from lessons on creating sustainable economic growth to the implications of government tax and fiscal policies. She has testified numerous times in front of Congress on the effects of fiscal stimulus, debt and deficits, and regulation on the economy. Previously, de Rugy has been a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, and a research fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.
Ben Freeman
Ben Freeman is director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute. He investigates money in politics, defense spending, and foreign influence in America. He is the author of The Foreign Policy Auction, which was the first book to systematically analyze the foreign influence industry in the United States. Before joining the Quincy Institute, Ben founded the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy, served as Deputy Director of the National Security program at Third Way, and was a National Security Fellow at the Project On Government Oversight. At the latter, he spear-headed creation of the “Foreign Influence Database,” a repository of propaganda distributed by foreign agents that was previously unavailable online.