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September 3rd, 2021 
Awake Goy 
These pages recently covered the Senate Armed Services Committee’s successful effort to add $25 billion in taxpayer-funded slush to the annual defense budget bill. Democrats and Republicans joined hands to fatten up the defense bill by 3.5 percent, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) casting the lone dissenting vote. That increase was just endorsed by the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) on Wednesday.
Lawmakers approved, again on a widespread and bipartisan basis, an amendment by the committee’s ranking Republican, Mike Rogers of Alabama, to add $23.9 billion to the House version of the defense bill. Rogers proudly noted that his amendment would provide for a five-percent increase over the defense budget topline enacted in the previous fiscal year. And that’s where the $1.2 trillion comes in.
Defense hawks in Congress have made no secret that they would like to see up to 5 percent growth in the defense budget each and every year. Rogers has said it. His Senate counterpart, Jim Inhofe (R-OK), has also said it. What few budget or military watchdogs have done is explain the compounding effects of 5 percent annual boosts to the defense budget.
Boosting the defense budget 5 percent each year over the next 10 fiscal years would leave the U.S. with a whopping $1.2 trillion defense budget by the end of the decade, heading into fiscal year (FY) 2031. Compare that 5 percent boost each year to what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office currently projects defense spending will be over the next 10 years (as of their most recent July 2021 estimate), and the delta (the difference between a 5 percent annual boost and current budget projections) over 10 years is astounding.
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