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Sure Looks Like Hegseth's Proposed Pentagon 'Cuts' Wouldn't Be Cuts at All
"It seems that this announcement may amount to a money-moving exercise within the agency itself rather than an overall Pentagon topline reduction," said one watchdog.
Feb 20, 2025
On the surface, a widely reported memo authored by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth appears to call for significant cuts to the massive U.S. military budget over each of the next five years—a proposal that quickly received positive feedback from some progressives.
But the details of Hegseth's proposal, and a public statement from the defense secretary's deputy, raise serious doubts about whether the floated spending "cuts" would be cuts at all.
The Washington Postreported Wednesday that Hegseth, in an internal memo, "ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years." Hegseth instructed officials to hand in their proposals by this coming Monday.
In response to the Post's reporting, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), long a vocal proponent of cutting the military budget as it approaches $1 trillion a year with bipartisan approval, wrote on social media that "when the Pentagon cannot complete an independent audit, we should cut military spending by 8% a year over the next five years."
"These savings should go to increasing Social Security benefits and strengthening VA healthcare," Sanders added.
That is not what the administration appears to have in mind.
In a statement issued Wednesday as headlines in major media outlets characterized Hegseth's memo as a striking call for "cuts," Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Salesses described the proposal as a push for "offsets" that could be used to fund other military-related efforts favored by President Donald Trump, including an "Iron Dome for America" that experts have ridiculed as a wasteful "fantasy."
"The department will develop a list of potential offsets that could be used to fund these priorities, as well as to refocus the department on its core mission of deterring and winning wars," said Salesses. "The offsets are targeted at 8% of the Biden administration's FY26 budget, totaling around $50 billion, which will then be spent on programs aligned with President Trump's priorities."
The U.S. military budget for Fiscal Year 2025 is roughly $850 billion.
I don’t understand the stories about the supposed cuts to the defense budget. If you “cut” parts of the defense budget and say you’re going to spend that money on a missile defense system…. that’s not really cutting the defense budget?
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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) February 20, 2025 at 1:14 AM
Hegseth's memo also reportedly exempts more than a dozen categories from being used for offsets, including nuclear weapon modernization, military operations at the southern U.S. border, and one-way attack drones.
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said Wednesday that "there is plenty of opportunity—and a desperate need for—deep cuts in Pentagon spending, if that is in fact what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is proposing."
"However, it seems that this announcement may amount to a money-moving exercise within the agency itself rather than an overall Pentagon topline reduction," said Weissman. "The Hegseth proposal wrongly exempts 17 categories from cuts, including areas that are ripe for savings and which should themselves be curtailed in the name of national security, like the nation's nuclear arsenal, missile defense, and drones. These protected categories give clues to the administration's priorities that may be disguised in partial reports about the Hegseth memo: increased militarization and ever-increasing corporate profits."
"It's too soon to know exactly what the Hegseth proposal entails, or if it would deliver actual cuts, and so not possible to issue even a preliminary assessment," he added. "But this much remains clear: It's time to cut—not increase—the Pentagon budget, and to devote the savings to human needs."
The details of Hegseth's memo emerged as Trump threw his support behind a House GOP budget blueprint that calls for a $100 billion increase in U.S. military spending, underscoring the administration's contradictory posture on the issue.
CNNnoted Wednesday that "Hegseth himself called for an increase to the defense budget one week ago."
"While visiting Stuttgart, Germany," the outlet reported, "Hegseth said, 'I think the U.S. needs to spend more than the Biden administration was willing to, who historically underinvested in the capabilities of our military.'"
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Why Can’t the US Get the Giant, Bloodsucking Health Insurance Tick off Its Back?
As with many problems in American life, it largely comes down to two factors: the legacy of white supremacy and corporate profits.
Dec 28, 2024
There’s only one person in this photograph of a recent G7 meeting who represents a country where an illness can destroy an entire family, leaving them bankrupt and homeless, with the repercussions of that sudden fall into poverty echoing down through generations.
Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens. That’s it. We’re the only one left.
The United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.
Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only because somebody in the family got sick.
Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden, and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.
Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll, whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10%.
We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.
And it’s not like we haven’t tried.
Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson all proposed and made an effort to bring a national healthcare system to the United States. Here’s one example really worth watching where President Kennedy is pushing a single-payer system (as opposed to Britain’s “socialist” model):
They all failed, and when I did a deep dive into the topic two years ago for my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare I found two major barriers to our removing that tick from our backs.
The early opposition, more than 100 years ago, to a national healthcare system came from Southern white congressmen (they were all men) and senators who didn’t want even the possibility that Black people could benefit, health-wise, from white people’s tax dollars. (This thinking apparently still motivates many white Southern politicians.)
The leader of that healthcare-opposition movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a German immigrant named Frederick Hoffman, as I mentioned in a recent newsletter. Hoffman was a senior executive for the Prudential Insurance Company, and wrote several books about the racial inferiority of Black people, a topic he traveled the country lecturing about.
His most well-known book was titled Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. It became a major best-seller across America when it was first published for the American Economic Association by the Macmillan Company in 1896, the same year the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision legally turned the entire U.S. into an apartheid state.
Hoffman taught that Black people, in the absence of slavery, were so physically and intellectually inferior to whites that if they were simply deprived of healthcare the entire race would die out in a few generations. Denying healthcare to Black people, he said, would solve the “race problem” in America.
Southern politicians quoted Hoffman at length, he was invited to speak before Congress, and was hailed as a pioneer in the field of “scientific racism.” Race Traits was one of the most influential books of its era.
By the 1920s, the insurance company he was a vice president of was moving from life insurance into the health insurance field, which brought an added incentive to lobby hard against any sort of a national healthcare plan.
Which brings us to the second reason America has no national healthcare system: profits.
“Dollar” Bill McGuire, a recent CEO of America’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth, made about $1.5 billion dollars during his time with that company. To avoid prosecution in 2007 he had to cough up $468 million, but still walked away a billionaire. Stephen J Hemsley, his successor, made off with around half a billion.
And that’s just one of multiple giant insurance companies feeding at the trough of your healthcare needs.
Much of that money, and the pay for the multiple senior executives at that and other insurance companies who make over $1 million a year, came from saying “No!” to people who file claims for payment of their healthcare costs.
This became so painful for Cigna Vice President Wendell Potter that he resigned in disgust after a teenager he knew was denied payment for a transplant and died. He then wrote a brilliant book about his experience in the industry: Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Healthcare and Deceiving Americans.
Companies offering such “primary” health insurance simply don’t exist (or are tiny) in almost every other developed country in the world. Mostly, where they do exist, they serve wealthier people looking for “extras” beyond the national system, like luxury hospital suites or air ambulances when overseas. (Switzerland is the outlier with exclusively private insurance, but it’s subsidized, mandatory, and nonprofit.)
If Americans don’t know this, they intuit it.
In the 2020 election there were quite a few issues on statewide ballots around the country. Only three of them outpolled President Joe Biden’s win, and expanding Medicaid to cover everybody was at the top of that list. (The other two were raising the minimum wage and legalizing pot.)
The last successful effort to provide government funded, single-payer healthcare insurance was when Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid (both single-payer systems) in the 1960s. It was a hell of an effort, but the health insurance industry was then a tiny fraction of its current size.
In 1978, when conservatives on the Supreme Court legalized corporations owning politicians with their Buckley v Belotti decision (written by Justice Louis Powell of “Powell Memo” fame), they made the entire process of replacing a profitable industry with government-funded programs like single-payer vastly more difficult, regardless of how much good they may do for the citizens of the nation.
The court then doubled-down on that decision in 2010, when the all-conservative vote on Citizens United cemented the power of billionaires and giant corporations to own politicians and even write and influence legislation and the legislative process.
Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only because somebody in the family got sick. But it would kill the billions every week in profits of the half-dozen corporate giants that dominate the health insurance industry.
This won’t be happening with a billionaire in the White House, but if we want to bring America into the 21st century with the next administration, we need to begin working, planning, and waking up voters now.
It’ll be a big lift: Keep it on your radar and pass it along.
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'Economic and Moral Failing': It's Been 15 Years Since Last Federal Minimum Wage Hike
"Voters understand that raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, even if their elected officials in state legislatures and Washington, D.C. remain inactive."
Jul 24, 2024
Former U.S. President Barack Obama had been in office for just over six months when the federal minimum wage was raised to a paltry $7.25 an hour—where it remains today, 15 years later.
Wednesday marked exactly a decade and a half since the federal wage floor was last lifted, an occasion that advocates used to tout state-level pay hikes and make the case for a long-overdue national increase, particularly as the nation's billionaires and corporations do better than ever.
"Workers can't afford to wait for Congress to act; they need to feed their families, pay their bills, and take care of their loved ones," said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a group that has backed ballot measures across the U.S. that have resulted in over $22 billion in additional earnings for workers.
"This year, we see a clear path to victory in Alaska and Missouri because when voters have the chance, they choose higher wages," Hall continued, referring to minimum wage ballot initiatives in the two states. "Voters understand that raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, even if their elected officials in state legislatures and Washington, D.C. remain inactive."
"It's been 15 years since the federal minimum wage was increased," Hall added, "and while this is both an economic and moral failing, we believe the solution lies in direct democracy through the ballot box."
A lot's changed since July 24, 2009. Barack Obama was president. Netflix was still mailing out DVDs in red envelopes.
What hasn't changed? The federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr. It is long past time to raise it. pic.twitter.com/gCY6FTWs9t
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) July 24, 2024
Years of inaction and obstruction by corporate-backed lawmakers in the U.S. Congress have spurred states and localities to raise their minimum wages well above the federal floor.
This year alone, according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), 25 states and 65 localities across the U.S. will raise their minimum wages, providing pay boosts for millions of workers.
"November 2024's election will provide even more opportunities for progress, as Arizona, Alaska, and Oklahoma will all likely have questions on the ballot on whether or not their state minimum wages should increase," Kyle Ross of the Center for American Progress noted Wednesday. "Voters in these states should take advantage of this chance to give workers a much-needed raise."
Twenty U.S. states still have minimum wages pegged to the federal floor, which is worth less today than "at any time since 1949," Axios' Emily Peck observed Wednesday.
Some lawmakers at the federal level have pushed, without success, for legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage. Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) introduced a bill that would incrementally hike the national wage floor to $17 an hour by 2028 and index it to median wages in subsequent years.
The measure did not receive a vote in the House or Senate. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 31 million U.S. workers are paid less than $17 an hour.
"The minimum wage has fallen so far behind the cost of living that millions of workers are earning wages too low to live on at the minimum wage and above it," Holly Sklar, CEO of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, said in a statement. "That's bad for workers and businesses."
"Local businesses depend on customers who make enough to buy their products and services," Sklar added. "Raising the minimum wage boosts consumer spending and helps businesses hire and retain employees. Businesses that are more invested in their employees benefit from lower turnover and increased productivity, and the kind of customer service that keeps customers coming back."
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