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TechnoratiHere's What America Really Spends on Security
Back in February 2006, the Bush administration requested, and Congress later approved, roughly $463 billion in funding for the Defense Department. But when it comes to what American taxpayers really spend on national security, this is just the tip of the iceberg. All told, the United States spent nearly $1 trillion on security in fiscal year 2007, which ended on September 30.
In addition to the money allocated to the Pentagon each year as part of the Defense Department's "base budget," hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on other federal programs that are a direct result of the United States supporting and maintaining its military.
For example, the United States spent $173 billion last year on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other costs the Pentagon says are related to the "Global War on Terror." According to the Congressional Research Service, $166 billion went to the Pentagon, $6 billion went to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, and $1 billion went to the Veterans' Administration. So far this year, the White House has requested $196 billion for similar war-related expenses.
The government also spent $43 billion on homeland security, not including $17 billion funded through the Defense Department budget. The additional money went through a number of other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security ($29 billion), the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.3 billion), and the Justice Department ($3.1 billion). Homeland security funding is one of the fastest growing areas of federal spending, quadrupling since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The White House further revealed that it spent $43 billion on intelligence-related activities last year. This announcement, the result of legislation passed by Congress in 2006, was the first time in a decade the government had officially released this figure. Roughly, 80 percent is thought to be funded through the Pentagon's annual budget, leaving an estimated $8 billion in additional intelligence spending.
Veterans' benefits accounted for $73 billion in federal spending last year to provide for those who've served their country in the past. Of this, $30 billion was for hospital and medical care and $42 billion for disability pensions and the G.I. education program. According to a recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of caring for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars could add $13 billion or more annually to this total.
And the list goes on. According to the White House, the government paid $433 billion in interest on the national debt, and a conservative estimate puts the cost of past military spending attributable to this debt at $99 billion annually.
The government paid $44 billion in pension benefits for retired military personnel. It also provided $55 billion for pay and benefits for civilian employees of the Defense Department (DoD), and a further $22 billion in pensions for Pentagon retirees.
The State Department provided almost $5 billion in military aid to foreign countries, and over $1 billion for international peacekeeping operations. It provided a further $420 million for such things as countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combating terrorism, and clearing landmines. The military's space program accounted for roughly 20 percent of NASA's budget, or $3 billion.
In all, the United States spent an estimated $990 billion last year on defense and other security-related activities. And even THIS figure is incomplete. It doesn't include, for instance, pay and benefits for non-DoD federal employees working on security issues for the Department of Homeland Security, State Department, or Department of Justice or Treasury. Nor does it include interest payments on past debt from paying veterans' benefits or retirees' pensions. It doesn't include the majority of the State Department's operating budget, although we must assume that at least some of our government's diplomatic initiatives are directed at promoting U.S. security.
Last year the total federal budget was roughly $2.8 trillion dollars. Former Senator Everett Dirksen is often credited with saying, regarding government spending, that "a billion here and a billion there, and soon you're talking real money." Well, in a $2.8 trillion annual budget, $1 trillion in security spending IS real money.
Christopher Hellman is a Military Policy Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C.
© 2007 MinutemanMedia.org
8 Comments so far
Show All"The military is there to protect the US....The world is not a nice place and filled with injustice, thats why we need a strong US Defense." These comments are typical of the viewpoint of the cult of the individual which is isolating us from the rest of the world and is essentially a suicidal view. Of course if you expect and see only danger, and become addicted to a bunker mentality, you have put yourself in a prison of your own making from which there is no escape, it is hopeless. The vision of creating a world filled with justice, cooperation, and conflict resolution without violence is slowly gaining ground as our only path to survival. When you look at the economics of violence prevention versus violence suppression, you can see the insanity of repeating our history of mistakes and expecting different results. Violence begets violence, and the escape route from violence is shrinking rapidly. I lobby for the creation of a U.S. Department of Peace and Nonviolence, HR 808, with the help of The Peace Alliance, a group of citizen activists worthy of your support.
MARS RULES... and then we wonder why there is no $ for health care for kids, why social security will have gone missing when Baby Boomers really come home (age wise) to claim it, why bridges collapse and cities remain unbuilt, why security is lax where it ought to be... but alas, all the $ to now spy on citizens and make of the land of the free, a virtual if not earnest police state. Welcome to Amerika 21st century combat zone!
I disagree. The usa spends nothing on security, but spends a heck of a lot on war. If you spent any money on security wouldn't you be somewhat safer? Seeing as you are not safer now than you were before the rise of the MIC, I'd have to say you've been robbed.
Woe unto us. Our nightmares of childhood have come true. the Dims enlarge the bureaucracy endlessly and mindlessly, for the "good of us all", and the Repugs twist it into methodologies of control and killing.... So we are caught between the smothering embrace of crazed missionaries dead set on helping themselves to the world's wealth, and crazed paranoids dead set on forcing all nations into compliance with their neurotic fear-caused projections....Both parties are just DEAD, as far as the exercise of reason is concerned. And death is what awaits us all, regardless so why worry?
Because life on earth is not about humans, which have proven incapable of controlling power. Our species is a beautiful one and deserves to survive, but not in the way we now envision. Let's begin to pray for a gradual readjusting to a more healthy natural balance. Time to take a BREAK. Lets allow all our relations...the other species...a time in the sun.
Amen.
Created insecurity by disgraceful criminal poicies insures the beast will get all it's voracious appetite demands. How do you think the military industrial complex insures it's bloated resources? We're on treadmill going nowhere folks. Wait a minute---we're going over a cliff.
Feel more secure since Homeland Security got created? Yeah, right! Katrinas and collapsed bridges are just the begining, folks, of a security nightmare. WAKE UP!!!!
For Israel and the M/I/I complex, not for security.
simple: Endless war for endless profits.... until, that is we are completely bankrupt, both morally and financially.
ENABLED CITIZENS ARE NEITHER FREE NOR PROTECTED CITIZENS UNDER LAYERS OF GROSS INCOMPETENCE
These words are enabled ... allowed by default ... not yet having tripped a security filter threshold somewhere that moves the writer up a one-way rachet ladder that never comes down again.
Or maybe they have. Who would know except those that put people on security lists? But don't worry citizens, you're still "free" subject to the "enable" umbrella, courtesy of some "patriotic" security flunkie somewhere with a secure income and benefit package.
False negative has been replaced by false positive - innocent until guilty replaced by guilty unless innocent - like permanent, repetitive drug tests that assume the results will be "true" positive until proven "true" negative.
Meanwhile, the false positives run rampant because there's no incentive (penalty) to avoid them - way too many on the lists - while the false negatives are appearing everywhere as gross incompetence in failing to catch what gets through the barriers and filters.
Why not load up the lists? After all, for example, how much skill does it take to identify someone who called someone who called someone who called someone who called a terrorist? You know, just in case. After all, the additional computer storage memory to do it is near zero. Why not use it? Besides, we can use it to pump up our government contracts.
There's something like 20 layers of rank and operations in some organizations associated with Homeland Security. Watching some of them on C-SPAN demonstrates they've become the epitomy of a suffocating, paralyzed bureacracy that is occasionally broken through with some emergency, hyped by the media and tutored by the appropriate "Chief of Inter Intra Regional Command Center of Counter Terror Operations for Barren County, U.S.A."
Yes indeed, let's not just take security out of the Constitution and put the Constitution back into the security where it belongs.
Be sure sure to spend huge, wasteful sums and spread it all around among private contractors everywhere, just like the Pentagon learned to do with its weapons programs. And everytime it lands someone a good job, that's one more voice that won't complain.