Senator Tom Cotton predicted that Congress would approve a defense budget that exceeds the Biden administration’s proposal for the coming year, while warning that low defense spending “entices our adversaries.”
Speaking at an event hosted by the Vandenberg Coalition last week, the Arkansas Republican said that he believes military spending should be increased by 3 to 5 percent over inflation annually, and that keeping defense spending at 3 percent of GDP is “way too low historically. It’s something that entices our adversaries.” Cotton said that, like President Jimmy Carter during his first year in office, Biden “was mugged by reality” — in Biden’s case, by the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal and other crises — but that, unlike Carter, the White House’s current occupant has refused to “arm up our military as he should.”
For two consecutive years, the White House’s budget proposal endorsed cuts to defense spending in real terms. As part of the defense-budget authorization process last year, Republicans and Democrats passed a measure that approved $37 billion more than what the Biden administration had requested. Lawmakers are expected to approve a similarly higher topline number this year, after the House passed a package authorizing nearly $840 billion in defense spending.
Cotton said that his new book reveals how House speaker Nancy Pelosi was compelled to strip last year’s package of socially progressive proposals in order to secure GOP support and get the bill to the president’s desk, after congressional progressives refused to support the higher topline. “I hope that dynamic plays out again over the next month or so,” he added.
He also predicted that the election of a Republican majority in the House this month would change that dynamic going forward.
“I know the House majority is not as large as I might have hoped, but it’s still a majority,” Cotton said. “That means they’re going to have a majority on the Armed Services Committee and on defense appropriations as well. So I think you’ll see more substantial increases in defense spending.”
Meanwhile, other conservative defense experts and lawmakers have called for defense budget boosts that would result in a topline figure exceeding $1.2 trillion.