Ukraine Aid Is 2.6 Percent of Omnibus Spending Bill

T here’s plenty to criticize in the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill. The 4,155-page bill was released around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, and passed the Senate on Thursday afternoon. This type of legislative sausage-making has been common for years, but it’s also an unserious way to govern. And for a budget hawk, the top-line $1.7 trillion figure would be troubling even if the bill were being passed through regular order.

But that top-line figure also demonstrates that aid to Ukraine is not a major reason the United States is saddled with $31 trillion of debt. The omnibus includes $45 billion in spending broadly intended to help repel the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That’s real money, but it also amounts to only 2.6 percent of the entire package. And if you add it to the other Ukraine aid passed since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February, you get a total of around $100 billion — or about 2.5 percent of total annual federal spending.

Because the spending on Ukraine is new, perhaps it is helpful to think of it as a percentage of the extra spending Congress has passed since Democrats took power in January 2021. Add up the March 2021 “Covid relief” stimulus, the infrastructure bill, and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, and you get a figure slightly above $3 trillion. So the $100 billion spent on Ukraine equals a little over 3 percent of the combined spending in those three bills.

There are certainly reasonable debates to be had about military aid to Ukraine, but some arguments have less merit than others. About 25 percent of congressional Republicans voted against the Ukraine-aid bill in May, and their primary objection was that the bill didn’t provide for oversight of how the aid would be spent. But, as the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, the May bill did in fact set aside “$5 million for oversight of emergency funds, including $4 million for the State Department inspector general and $1 million for the U.S. Agency for International Development inspector general. There is also a provision that would require the Defense Department to report on measures taken to keep track of equipment provided to Ukraine.”

For most interested observers, Ukraine aid is fundamentally an issue of foreign policy rather than economics. Hawks generally believe that it is both morally right and in our national-security interest to help the Ukrainians. They believe that it is worth preventing Putin from gobbling up a country that shares a border with NATO and the EU, our key military allies and trading partners. They believe it’s worth degrading a major adversary’s military without spilling a drop of American blood — and, hopefully, deterring future Chinese aggression by showing the world there’s a heavy price to pay for an unjust and unprovoked invasion of a U.S. partner. To them, $100 billion is a reasonable price to pay in comparison with the long-term economic and national-security costs of an emboldened Russia and China.

The doves generally believe that continued U.S. aid risks backing Putin into a corner, and thus increases the odds of Russian escalation. They generally believe that the most important thing is an end to hostilities and that it matters little or not at all to the United States whether Putin conquers some or all of Ukraine, so cutting off aid might hasten the end of the war by forcing Ukraine to give up on efforts to reclaim the land taken by Russia since February. They further argue that sending money and munitions to Ukraine is actually degrading our ability to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan.

This is a serious foreign-policy debate worth having. But neither hawks nor doves should be under any illusion: The help we’ve given Ukrainians who are fighting and dying in order to push Putin’s army out of their country is not a major source of our fiscal woes.