Stephen Semler is cofounder of Security Policy Reform Institute, a grassroots-funded US foreign policy think tank.
American police departments are armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry like Humvees and assault rifles. Nothing is stopping President Biden from shutting down this military-to-police pipeline right away.
Average Americans want to cut the military budget, but a constant stream of defense contractor cash to Congress makes such cuts unlikely. Perhaps the best way to argue against the continued expansion of the gargantuan budget for war: insist that we need that money for measures like $2,000 survival checks.
A look at the numbers reveals that congressional Democrats who voted for Trump’s defense budget last week accepted four times as much war industry cash in the House and six times as much in the Senate as those who voted against. To stop the war machine from sucking up resources that could be used on social programs, we need to confront those Democrats happy to rake in cash from war profiteers.