Dear John,
The newly passed Republican budget will cause completely unnecessary human suffering on a massive scale.
As we showed with our Institute for Policy Studies colleagues, the budget will result in millions of people losing their health insurance, and millions more losing food stamps. And it will cut off those lifelines for the poorest among us while making the richest Americans even richer.
But the budget also injects more than $300 billion in new spending on the Pentagon and Republican plans to amp up their cruel and dystopian attacks on immigrants. That includes:
- $25 billion for Trump’s Golden Dome, a doomed-to-fail missile defense system that will cost untold billions more if the program isn’t ended;
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$14 billion for autonomous and AI-driven weapons or “killer drones” that will spell new nightmares for civilians in war zones;
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$45 billion for new immigrant detention centers, nearly tripling ICE’s annual detention budget, plus $29.9 billion for ICE’s operations, a threefold increase;
- $46.6 billion for border wall construction;
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$3.3 billion for the Pentagon to back up Trump’s deportations and border militarization.
That money represents more foreign conflicts, more gratuitous bombing of other nations and their civilian populations, more immigrant neighbors kidnapped and separated from their families and communities.
Our earlier analysis of the House version of the bill, which was nearly identical to the final version on these particular items, found that the new spending on the Pentagon and mass deportation agenda would have been enough on an annual basis to cover the millions of people at risk of losing their Medicaid coverage and food stamps.
The Republican budget passed by the narrowest of margins. But laws can be made and unmade, and this conversation has only just begun. As our ally Bishop William Barber II said at his rally at the U.S. Capitol on Monday, “You will not kill us or our people without a fight.”
In solidarity,
Alliyah, Hanna, Kumail, Lindsay, and Olabisi
