LISTEN: The Case against Unlimited Pentagon Spending

The idea that the simple act of increasing defense spending will lead to a more effective military is one which needs to be erased forever.

POGO's Dan Grazier was a guest on the Steele & Ungar show, a live daily program on SiriusXM’s POTUS channel, to talk about a recent speech made by Donald Trump on defense spending in which he proposed lifting the cap. However, as POGO’s Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information shows through its work and analysis, increasing the budget will not increase effectiveness.

Trump is hardly the first to advocate a limitless defense budget as a solution. Civilian Pentagon officials and their uniformed counterparts rarely appear before Congress without mentioning the need to end caps on the Pentagon’s budget. For the next year, that budget is set at over $600 billion, with $551 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget and a floor of $58.8 billion for the war spending account.

“They claim that the mandatory budget caps are the cause of the military's struggles to reset and modernize after 15 years of war,” said Grazier.

And that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact there is plenty of evidence to show that increased Pentagon spending actually results in a less effective military.

For more insight on the budget debate, read the Straus Military Reform Project’s work.