By Eric Boehm
January 22, 2014
Photo courtesy aljazeera.com
Military contractors spent millions lobbying Congress last year, and it seems to have worked.
They stand to get billions in return.
The military-industrial complex has emerged as one of the big winners in the budget deal working its way through Congress, but headed for approval.
The omnibus spending bill basically eliminates $22 billion in proposed cuts to the Department of Defense — cuts that were once part of the much-feared “sequester” that took effect in March 2013 due to the lack of a federal budget bill — and hands the Pentagon nearly $500 million for 2014.
An analysis by The Hill says the defense budget was supposed to be around $475 billion before Congress decided to repeal the sequester cuts, bringing the final total to about $497 billion.
The Defense Department also is getting $85 billion — an increase of $5 billion from last year — for the ongoing was in Afghanistan, which is not included in the baseline budget because wars are funded in a separate and sterile-sounding part of the budget known as “overseas contingency operations.”