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‘Don't Give the Pentagon $1 Trillion,’ Critics Say as House Passes Record US Military Spending Bill
"From ending the nursing shortage to insuring uninsured children, preventing evictions, and replacing lead pipes, every dollar the Pentagon wastes is a dollar that isn't helping Americans get by," said one group.
Dec 10, 2025
US House lawmakers on Wednesday approved a $900.6 billion military spending bill, prompting critics to highlight ways in which taxpayer funds could be better spent on programs of social uplift instead of perpetual wars.
The lower chamber voted 312-112 in favor of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2026, which will fund what President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans call a "peace through strength" national security policy. The proposal now heads for a vote in the Senate, where it is also expected to pass.
Combined with $156 billion in supplemental funding included in the One Big Beautiful Bill signed in July by Trump, the NDAA would push military spending this fiscal year to over $1 trillion—a new record in absolute terms and a relative level unseen since World War II.
The House is about to vote on authorizing $901 billion in military spending, on top of the $156 billion included in the Big Beautiful Bill.70% of global military spending already comes from the US and its major allies.www.stephensemler.com/p/congress-s...
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— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler.bsky.social) December 10, 2025 at 1:16 PM
The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) led opposition to the bill on Capitol Hill, focusing on what lawmakers called misplaced national priorities, as well as Trump's abuse of emergency powers to deploy National Guard troops in Democratic-controlled cities under pretext of fighting crime and unauthorized immigration.
Others sounded the alarm over the Trump administration's apparent march toward a war on Venezuela—which has never attacked the US or any other country in its nearly 200-year history but is rich in oil and is ruled by socialists offering an alternative to American-style capitalism.
"I will always support giving service members what they need to stay safe but that does not mean rubber-stamping bloated budgets or enabling unchecked executive war powers," CPC Deputy Chair Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said on social media, explaining her vote against legislation that "pours billions into weapons systems the Pentagon itself has said it does not need."
"It increases funding for defense contractors who profit from global instability and it advances a vision of national security rooted in militarization instead of diplomacy, human rights, or community well-being," Omar continued.
"At a time when families in Minnesota’s 5th District are struggling with rising costs, when our schools and social services remain underfunded, and when the Pentagon continues to evade a clean audit year after year, Congress should be investing in people," she added.
The Congressional Equality Caucus decried the NDAA's inclusion of a provision banning transgender women from full participation in sports programs at US military academies:
The NDAA should invest in our military, not target minority communities for exclusion.While we're grateful that most anti-LGBTQI+ provisions were removed, the GOP kept one anti-trans provision in the final bill—and that's one too many.We're committed to repealing it.
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— Congressional Equality Caucus (@equality.house.gov) December 10, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Advocacy groups also denounced the legislation, with the Institute for Policy Studies' National Priorities Project (NPP) noting that "from ending the nursing shortage to insuring uninsured children, preventing evictions, and replacing lead pipes, every dollar the Pentagon wastes is a dollar that isn't helping Americans get by."
"The last thing Congress should do is deliver $1 trillion into the hands of [Defense] Secretary Pete Hegseth," NPP program director Lindsay Koshgarian said in a statement Wednesday. "Under Secretary Hegseth's leadership, the Pentagon has killed unidentified boaters in the Caribbean, sent the National Guard to occupy peaceful US cities, and driven a destructive and divisive anti-diversity agenda in the military."
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'Corporate Greed at Its Ugliest': These 100 Companies Pay CEOs Over 600x What the Workers Get
"At a time when many American workers are struggling with high costs for groceries and housing, the nation's largest low-wage employers are fixated on making their overpaid CEOs even richer," said the author of a new report.
Aug 21, 2025
Detailing the widening gap between outrageously high CEO compensation and the median wages of employees at some of the world's largest and most profitable companies, a progressive think tank on Thursday warned executives will continue to enrich themselves at the expense of their lowest-paid workers unless policies are adopted to curb such corporate greed.
"Across the political spectrum, Americans are fed up with overpaid CEOs," said Sarah Anderson, program director at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and author of a new report out Thursday. "Policymakers should take long overdue action to push Corporate America in a more equitable direction."
The report, Executive Excess 2025, finds that absent federal policies forcing corporations to rein in their spending on stock buybacks and exorbitant CEO pay packages, the average CEO-to-worker pay gap widened by 12.9% last year at what IPS calls the "Low-Wage 100"—the 100 S&P 500 companies with the lowest median worker pay.
The average gap between executive and worker pay now stands at 632-to-1 at these firms, up from 560-to-1 in 2023.
Between 2019-24, the average CEO at a Low-Wage 100 company saw their pay rise 34.7%, unadjusted for inflation, while the average median worker pay rose just 16.3%.
CEO compensation increased by 22.6% over the time period, far outpacing inflation. Meanwhile, wage hikes by these same companies didn't even match inflation, including for warehouse workers at software company Aptiv, where the CEO-to-worker pay gap was 2,072-to-1 last year, or cashiers at Ross Stores, where the gap was 1,770-to-1.
"We can curb this runaway source of inequality by taxing corporate greed."
Aptiv CEO Kevin Clark was paid $18.8 million last year while the median worker at the firm made just $9,052. Ross Stores' pay ratio was similar, with CEO Barbara Rentler taking home $17 million compared to the company's median worker, who made just $9,602.
Starbucks, which has made headlines in recent years both for its store employees' fight to unionize across the United States and for its executives' illegal union-busting tactics, had far-and-away the largest gap between CEO and median worker pay in 2024, with CEO Brian Niccol taking home $95.8 million and the median employee earning just $14,674.
That makes the wage gap 6,666-to-1 at the coffee chain.
A petition organized last year by Starbucks Workers United, which has unionized at hundreds of stores since a landmark victory in Buffalo, New York in 2021, warned Niccol that the cost of living across the US "is skyrocketing while you continue to make millions" and the employees "who actually make your Starbucks run can't make ends meet."
IPS said the petition reflected its report's main finding: "At a time when many American workers are struggling with high costs for groceries and housing, the nation's largest low-wage employers are fixated on making their overpaid CEOs even richer."
Contributing to the growing wage gap at the Low-Wage 100 is the companies' focus on stock buybacks, in which firms buy back their own shares to "artificially inflate executive stock-based pay and siphon resources out of worker wages and productive long-term investments."
The 100 companies spent $644 billion on stock buybacks from 2019-24, according to IPS, with home improvement giant Lowe's ranking as the "stock buy back leader," spending $46.6 billion buying its own shares over the past six years.
"That sum could've instead covered the cost of giving each of the firm's 273,000 global employees an annual $28,456 bonus for six years," reads the report. "In 2024, Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison enjoyed total compensation of $20.2 million, which is 659 times the retailer's $30,606 median annual worker pay."
Anderson said the report highlights "how America's largest low-wage employers are funneling profits into their CEOs' pockets—at the expense of both their workers and their companies' long-term growth."
IPS pointed to "three particularly promising areas for CEO pay policy reform," including:
- Subjecting corporations to higher tax levies if they have excessive levels of CEO pay;
- Taxing and restricting stock buybacks; and
- Using federal contracts and subsidies to discourage wide corporate pay gaps.
Congress should pass the Curtailing Executive Overcompensation (CEO) Act, which would apply an excise tax to companies with CEO-to-worker pay ratios exceeding 50-to-1, or the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, said the group.
"A May 2024 survey suggests that such taxes would be enormously popular," reads the report. "Overall, 80% of likely voters favor a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEOs over 50 or more times more than what they pay their median employees. Large majorities in every political group support this approach: some 89% of Democrats, 77% of independents, and 71% of Republicans. In swing states, 83% of likely voters give this proposal a thumbs up."
Other legislation, the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, would quadruple the 1% federal excise tax currently in effect for stock buybacks, and would have raised $6.3 billion from the Low-Wage 100 if it had been in effect in 2023 and 2024—enough to cover the cost of 327,218 public housing units each year for two years.
"We can curb this runaway source of inequality," said IPS, "by taxing corporate greed."
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'We Will Organize Those People,' Anti-Poverty Crusader William Barber Says of Millions Set to Lose Medicaid
"They will not kill us and our communities without a fight."
Jul 02, 2025
Armed with 51 caskets and a new federal analysis, faith leaders and people who would be directly impacted by U.S. President Donald Trump's so-called Big Beautiful Bill got arrested protesting in Washington, D.C. this week and pledged to organize the millions of Americans set to lose their health insurance under the package.
Citing Capitol Police, The Hill reported Monday that "a total of 38 protestors were arrested, including 24 detained at the intersection of First and East Capitol streets northeast and another 14 arrested in the Capitol Rotunda. Those taken into custody were charged with crowding, obstructing, and incommoding."
The "Moral Monday" action was organized because of the "dangerous and deadly cuts" in the budget reconciliation package, which U.S. Senate Republicans—with help from Vice President JD Vance—sent to the House of Representatives Tuesday and which the lower chamber took up for consideration Wednesday.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the megabill would result in an estimated 17 million Americans becoming uninsured over the next decade: 11.8 million due to the Medicaid cuts, 4.2 million people due to expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits, and another 1 million due to other policies.
"This is policy violence. This is policy murder," Bishop William Barber said at Monday's action, which began outside the U.S. Supreme Court followed by a march to the Capitol. "That's why we brought these caskets today—because in the first year of this bill, as it is, the estimates are that 51,000 people will die."
"If you know that, and still pass it, that's not a mistake," added Barber, noting that Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)—one of three Republican senators who ultimately opposed the bill—had said before the vote that his party was making a mistake on healthcare.
Moral Mondays originated in Tillis' state a dozen years ago, to protest North Carolina Republicans' state-level policymaking, led by Barber, who is not only a bishop but also president of the organization Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
This past Monday, Barber vowed that if federal lawmakers kick millions of Americans off their healthcare with this megabill, "we will organize those people," according to Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
In partnership with IPS and the Economic Policy Institute, Repairers of the Breach on Monday published The High Moral Stakes of Budget Reconciliation fact sheet, which examines the version of the budget bill previously passed by the House. The document highlights cuts to health coverage, funding for rural hospitals, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
The fact sheet also points out that while slashing programs for the poor, the bill would give tax breaks to wealthy individuals and corporations, plus billions of dollars to the Pentagon and Trump's mass deportation effort.
"Instead of inflicting policy violence on the most vulnerable, Congress should harness America's abundant wealth to create a moral economy that works for all of us," the publication asserts. "By fairly taxing the wealthy and big corporations, reducing our bloated military budget, and demilitarizing immigration policy, we could free up more than enough public funds to ensure we can all survive and thrive."
"As our country approaches its 250th anniversary," it concludes, "we have no excuse for not investing our national resources in ways that reflect our Constitutional values: to establish justice, domestic tranquility, real security, and the general welfare for all."
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