WTH is Congress Undermining Our National Defense? Mackenzie Eaglen Explains

What the Hell Is Going On

AEI Podcasts

News, History, Government, Politics

4.4 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Congress narrowly averted a government shutdown last week when it passed a continuing resolution – a stop-gap spending bill that finances the government for a little over a month. What does this really mean? It means that we are spending at previous levels of government while important investment bills for the future are frozen, hamstringing the federal government in carrying out its number one job: to provide for the common defense. But the problem is bigger, and goes back further, than this week. Our Defense Department is underfunded and spending priorities are misaligned; multi-year appropriations are wildly out of touch with real inflation numbers; Congress treats weapons contractor behemoths like they are a de facto member of the bureaucracy. And the proverbial icing on the cake? The Pentagon is not only lagging in relation to prior output, it is lagging behind China. The investment in military and defense preparedness with our number one threat should never be inverse, but China is steadily investing, while the US is stagnating and slipping.

Mackenzie Eaglen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where she works on defense strategy, defense budgets, and military readiness. She is a member of the board of advisers of the Alexander Hamilton Society, a member of the steering committee of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security, one of the 12-member US Army War College Board of Visitors, and a member of the Commission on the Future of the Navy.

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute.
0:03.1	If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell is talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on?
0:01.1	Who in God's name
0:21.7	knows what it's all about.
0:36.6	Hi, I'm Daniel Pledka. What the hell is going on? Mark Tison. Welcome to our podcast. What the hell is going on? Mark, what the hell is going on now?
0:43.2	Well, what the hell is going on is we've averted a government shutdown for roughly 47 days, and we're under a continuing resolution, which means we're spending at previous levels on the government. And that
0:56.4	means, as usual, the defense department is getting screwed. And not just not the defense departments.
1:02.0	Many people will look at that and say, well, so what, you know, government bureaucracy, big
1:05.9	money, they have tons of money. They're okay. Now, the American people are getting screwed because
1:09.8	the Constitution,
1:11.5	the number one job of the federal government is provide for the common defense. That is what we do.
1:16.2	And in Washington, everything else is, unless it's an enumerated power in the Constitution,
1:21.0	is optional. Providing for the common defense is everything. It is the peace and stability
1:27.0	around the world that the Defense Department
1:28.6	provides is what allows us to live our lives unmolested by foreign powers. It allows us to go
1:35.0	about our daily existence trying to deal with Joe Biden's inflation and the crime wave and everything
1:40.8	else that we have problems we have here. If you add a foreign war on top of that
1:45.0	or a country attacking us, we're done. And so we need a defense department that's going to deter
1:50.3	those adversaries so that we can live our lives here. And the defense department is not just,
1:55.8	it's not just behind the curve. We are behind China. The Chinese Communist Party is investing like crazy in their
2:02.5	military, much more so than they say, much more than our intelligence community says, and we are
2:07.4	not keeping up, and we are going to be behind them in a big way if we don't get our act together.
	...

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