US Government Shutdown Watch: 2018 Edition. More Bricks in the Wall?

Psh didn’t you read the “what happened to you lately” thread? I’m addicted to extroversion dawg

I don’t know if it’ll lead to a more substantial ‘graveyard gift’ but an Armando burrito will be much better going down.

For a brief moment, this restores some hope that perhaps, the Republican will grow a pair and stop Trump from destroying the country.

But then I believed in Santa Claus for a long time.

The Pentagon announced it has diverted $1 billion to pay for Trump’s wall (well, I guess a tiny part of it).

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/25/politics/pentagon-congress-new-wall-money/index.html

The Pentagon notified Congress Monday night that it has authorized the transfer of $1 billion to begin new wall construction along the US-Mexico border, drawing immediate objections from Democratic lawmakers.

A Pentagon budget reprogramming notification sent to Capitol Hill on Monday and obtained by CNN indicates that up to $1 billion will go toward building 57 miles of fencing, improving roads and other measures on the southern border.

Nope. That’s illegal.

Also, I’d like to know where they got an extra billing dollars that apparently want already being allocated to something.

Examples have been published already, I thought here in this thread also. It’s all reallocation from other projects, like cancelled new construction and upgrades at bases.

Pretty sure the line item for the budget is not “military slush fund.”

Those dollars are allocated to specific things. If they don’t need them, give the money back to the people.

Haha, you funny.

Aside from the fact that this is illegal, it tells me two other things:

  • The military has more money than they need, so time to start cutting their budget;
  • No service member better suffer now for lack of anything, or we know the reason why they did.

This sets a pretty bad precedent for the military saying they are underfunded in the future. Them having an extra billion to give up isn’t going to help the next general who goes in front of congress asking for funds. Damn stupid move by them. I also assume many in the military know that they will regret this.

This would be true, if there were any party looking to cut military spending. Right now both parties are all about throwing as much money at defense spending as possible, it’s just one wants to increase domestic spending equally.

Didn’t defense spending decline under the last two Democratic administrations?

It went down under Clinton, certainly.

Under Obama the formal budget went down in one year by a little due to the “Sequestration” fiasco, but once you add the “Overseas Contingency Operations” funds into the equation, I believe total spending actually still increased by a bit.

I think it declined.

I generally agree that Dems are too wary of cutting military spending for political reasons, but I also think that in practice they end up cutting it. And I know the sequestration gets some credit for cutting it under Obama, but the sequestration was a direct consequence of Obama’s unwillingness to cave to Republican demands, so he deserves some credit for it.

I guess Republican Presidents aren’t bound so much by the rule that Congress gets to decide spending.

I hope the next Dem President rams this up Republican asses over and over again. Take all $700+ billion from the military budget and spend it on global warming.

Cowards and traitors, the lot of them.

Yet not so cowardly when they have the power. I want to see the cowardice when they are the minority. I can dream, can’t I?

I look forward to Warren declaring Year 0 and appointing her dog Bailey to the Senate. Kentucky, meet your newest representative:

Still better than Trump.