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This week the House is expected to vote on H.R. 2021 giving Trump's Pentagon nearly $1.5 trillion over the next 2 years. The DoD can't justify this budget because it can't pass an audit. Who will stand up to the military industrial complex & vote no to defeat this bill? 1/12
The Pentagon’s budget has already been increased by $165 billion over the past two years – more than the entire military budget of Russia. Meanwhile, Congress keeps appropriating money to buy warplanes and other weapons systems that our own generals tell us we do not need. 2/12
We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined, many of which are our close allies or strategic partners. In fact, we spend more on the Pentagon today than during the height of the Vietnam War, the Korean War or the Cold War after adjusting for inflation. 3/12
How can we keep giving more money to the Pentagon than it needs when 40 million live in poverty, 34 million have no health insurance, half of older Americans have no retirement savings, & 140 million can’t afford basic needs without going into debt? This is insanity. 4/12
On 9-10-01, Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld: “Our financial systems are decades old...we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor...because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.” 5/12
Almost 18 years after Rumsfeld’s statement, the Department of Defense has still not passed a clean audit despite the fact that the Pentagon controls assets in excess of $2.2 trillion, or roughly 70 percent of what the entire federal government owns. 6/12 cbsnews.com/news/the-war-o…
The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded in 2011 that over $31 billion spent in Iraq and Afghanistan had been lost to fraud and waste. 7/12 cbsnews.com/news/report-up…
In '15, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that the Pentagon could not account for $45 billion in funding for reconstruction projects. In '16, the Post reported that the Pentagon buried evidence of $125 billion in administrative waste. 8/12
In March of 2019, the GAO reported that “many DOD programs continue to fall short of cost, schedule, and performance goals. Consequently, DOD often pays more than anticipated, buys less than expected, and, in some cases, delivers fewer capabilities to the warfighter.” 9/12
65% of the American people oppose increasing the Pentagon’s budget. But instead of listening to the majority of Americans, Congress continues to listen to huge defense contractors that have paid billions in fines & settlements for fraud. 10/12 commondreams.org/views/2018/03/…
President Dwight Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Are there not 19 Dems in the House who share these views today? 11/12
What President Eisenhower, a Republican five-star general, said was true in 1953 & it is true today. Let's get our priorities right. Let's freeze defense spending, audit the Pentagon & defeat H.R. 2021 that would authorize nearly $1.5 trillion over 2 years for endless war. 12/12
