ANALYSIS: Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana) threatened “war is inevitable,” in Thursday’s Senate Appropriations Committee markup. Is it?
The bellicose Tester, speaking on the Fiscal Year 2025 Department of Defense Appropriations Act, has uncovered a faultline in U.S. elections: the incentives for unelected government and Department of Defense officials in funding and maintaining states of war around the globe, and an uprising of anti-establishment sentiment against U.S. intervention abroad.
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Tester holds key seats on critical defense and appropriations committees, and maintains Democrats’ slim Senate majority.
But the isolated issue of defense spending has been overshadowed by Americans’ limited appetite for continued foreign intervention after two decades of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the United States’ disastrous exit from Afghanistan. Add to that the Pentagon’s six-year streak in failing its audits.
[Will the Pentagon ever pass an audit again?]
The Pentagon’s tangle of accounting records reveal little. Upstream of the Pentagon’s bloated spending, is a byzantine procurement pipeline and the exact location of the products of defense equipment. The Department of Defense could not locate 63% of its $3.8 trillion in physical defense assets according to a 2023 report.
The Senate’s Armed Services Committee conducts Department of Defense audits, but Tester’s Defense Subcommittee holds the keys to Pentagon funding. Military spending represents the lion’s share of U.S. discretionary spending, dwarfing all other government discretionary expenditures.
Meanwhile, in a shocking development, $3.8 billion in U.S. cash, funneled through the U.N., has been handed over to the Taliban, being “literally flown in,” to Afghanistan since 2021.
The vulnerable Tester, in calling to pass the Senate’s Fiscal Year 2025 Department of Defense Appropriations Act, straddles the U.S. Defense spending apparatus, while also collecting cash from defense lobbyists. Defense lobbying cash started flowing to Tester’s campaign coffers after he scored the coveted Defense Appropriations Committee Chair seat.
Tester has continued to rake in hundreds of thousands from defense industry lobbying and related interests this cycle.
Montanans’ appetite for continued global conflict could shape Tester’s contest with Republican Tim Sheehy, who decided to enter politics upon witnessing the carnage in the U.S.’ 2021 exit from Kabul. Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL, has also criticized U.S. involvement with Ukraine.
Emboldened by former President Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda, which has maintained a pared-down focus on trade, immigration, and limiting foreign involvement, Sheehy joins a list of MAGA Republicans for an American pullback from foreign wars.
Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine is unpopular among Americans, with 70% favoring a resolution through peace talks. With Russia and China’s show of muscle off the coast of Alaska last month, the threat of China in the Strait of Taiwan, and yet-to-materialize retaliation against Israel from Iran, the need for an equipped U.S. Armed Forces looms large.
Yet absent strong executive leadership in the White House that could check other powers on the world stage diplomatically, the U.S. defense apparatus, and Senators like the vulnerable Tester, have little incentive to roll back funding foreign conflicts—or foreclosing the possibility of U.S. troops in new foreign wars. And, with no accountability on defense spending on the horizon, there are no incentives in sight for Senate purse strings to tighten, either.
