With trillions of dollars being spent to battle the COVID-19 pandemic along with the next Pentagon budget topping out at more than $740 billion, now is an opportune moment to reassess what the federal government is spending money on, a panel of Washington, D.C. policy analysts said Wednesday.
Jonathan Bydlak, director of R Street Institute’s fiscal and budget policy project, said he comes at the issue from a fiscally conservative perspective.
“There’s a notion out there, and I think it’s a legitimate one, that everything needs to be on the table. What are we paying and what are we getting in return?” Mr. Bydlak said. “Sometimes that framework is not applied to the Pentagon in quite as rigorous a way.”
While “Defund the Pentagon” has recently become a rallying cry for some on the far-left fringe, simply shifting the money to another federal program won’t solve the nation’s spending problem.
“If you’re going to cut money from a wasteful or overpriced program, it needs to go to deficit reduction — not spending somewhere else,” said Wendy Johnson, a senior policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense. “If we decided to convert the Pentagon to condominiums, that would save money too. Simply something that would cut spending is not necessarily helpful in the larger debate.”
It is at least debatable whether the massive defense spending over the last several years has made Americans more safe, the panelists agreed.
“Just giving (the Pentagon) a blank check and not challenging them on how that money is going to be spent won’t make us safer,” said Mandy Smithberger, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight. “If money was going to fix everything, it would be fixed.”
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.
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