Secretary of Defense James Mattis told Congress that President Donald Trump’s Pentagon budget plan will not be sufficient to fulfill his campaign promise to “rebuild” the U.S. military, CNN reported on Friday.
Mattis made those comments in private, per CNN’s report, which cites four unnamed sources familiar with those conversations.
One unnamed Republican lawmaker told CNN that Mattis said he is “being thwarted getting his message out” that the budget plan “is insufficient to do what Trump has called for.”
CNN also reported that the Trump administration’s Pentagon budget request falls short of what the Pentagon wanted, citing unnamed sources with knowledge of the deliberations.
“We expect Congress will work with the administration to fund much of our additional (fiscal) 2017 budget request,” a Pentagon spokesman said in a statement to CNN. “The secretary and the service chiefs highlighted the readiness needs of the armed forces in their recent testimony. That has not changed.”
It turns out that paying for stuff is hard when you can’t just scam someone else [in this case, another country] into paying for it instead!
Why does our military need “rebuilding”? That’s absurd.
Totally. Same bullshit from the same playbook ever since team b in the late 70s.
We already spend way too much on the Pentagon, and there’s no reason to believe a word from anyone of Trump’s clowns.
They’re like kids in a candy store – they figured that with the GOP in charge and hating on social programs that they’d get way more than the $50 billion extra already planned.
Of course, the pentagon has been saying this pretty much since the end of ww2. No matter how much they get, it’s never enough, and they always want more. Sometimes even when they want to cancel programs and congress won’t let them, they still want more money overall.
Maybe if they were getting twice as much as everyone else in the world combined. (On the other hand, if trump gets us into as many wars as it seems he might, there’s going to be a lot of stuff to replace,)