To: The United States House of Representatives and The United States Senate
Eliminate the Pentagon’s Slush Fund
It's time to stop the budget gimmicks and be honest about our bloated Pentagon budget. After years of using war spending as a slush fund to avoid fiscal discipline, it's time to end the Overseas Contingency Operations account, cut wasteful spending at the Pentagon, and bring our tax dollars home.
Why is this important?
By the end of this year, most of our troops will be home from Afghanistan and our nation will finally turn the page on more than 13 years of war. The President has promised to pivot our nation from its war-footing, do some nation building here at home, and put our fiscal house in order by finally reining in the Pentagon's bloated and waste-ridden budget.
But the Pentagon has a trick to keep the money flowing, a massive slush fund known in Washington as the 'Overseas Contingency Operations' (OCO) account. By using that slush fund, the Pentagon and its friends in Congress have managed to not only protect billions of dollars in wasteful spending, but to completely avoid any of the dramatic cuts that domestic programs like education and health care have faced over the past few years (1)!
It’s time to get rid of the Pentagon’s slush fund.
Our troops are finally coming home from the Middle East, yet the Pentagon's budget remains sky-high. Over the past year, more than half our troops in Afghanistan came home, yet the Pentagon's account for the war actually increased! This wasn't because the 30,000 troops in Afghanistan were suddenly twice as costly. Rather than bringing our tax dollars home with our troops - and using some of that money to pay to heal the wounds of our veterans from over a decade of war - Congress chose to protect the profits of Pentagon contractors by adding billions to the Pentagon's OCO slush fund on spending that had nothing to do with the war in Afghanistan and everything to do with special interests in Washington.
Recently, the Pentagon released its budget for the coming year, and it looks ready to continue the gimmicks, keeping its slush fund for years to come. Every dollar the Pentagon puts in its slush fund is a dollar less for early childhood education, nutrition assistance, and health care, all of which are being slammed by deep budget cuts. Some in Congress are calling for giving the Pentagon even more money and paying for it by cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Congress and the Pentagon are depending on Americans not noticing their budget gimmicks. They're hoping that they can keep using the pretext of the war in Afghanistan to throw tens of billions of dollars into failing weapons systems and wasteful spending at the Pentagon.
Thankfully, we can stop them. Sign this petition today to demand that Congress get rid of the Pentagon's slush fund, cut wasteful spending at the Pentagon, and bring our tax dollars home after 13 years of war.