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By C.J. Atkins
President Donald Trump is expected to sign a massive $738 billion defense spending bill today that has now passed both the House and Senate with overwhelming support from both Republican and Democratic lawmkers. The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) covers military spending through Sept. 30 of next year and ups the Pentagon budget by a whopping $22 billion over last year’s total.
A big prize for Trump is money for his campaign to militarize the heavens—“Space Force.” It also gives the administration freedom to continue backing the deadly Saudi campaign in Yemen and passes on a chance to repeal the open-ended authorization for endless war that started with Iraq in 2002.
Last week, the House of Representatives approved the measure by an overwhelming margin—377 to 48. The lopsided result was repeated in the Senate, with 86 members giving the thumbs-up and only 8 voting no. Negotiations over the war budget had stretched on for months, with border wall funding a key sticking point. The wall, another pet project of Trump’s, threatened to derail funding for the U.S. military machine. But to avoid that outcome, the wall money debate was kicked over to other spending bills.
Upon news that the Senate had agreed to the conference version of the bill, the president expressed his satisfaction, tweeting: “Wow! All of our priorities have made it into the final NDAA… Congress—don’t delay this anymore!”
Dominance over land, sea, air, and space
Trump’s Space Force, which has earned ridicule for the science fiction notions it evokes, is actually quite serious business. “It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space,” Trump told the National Space Council last summer. “We must have American dominance in...
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