A little more than a year ago, the respected Bulletin of Atomic Scientists — the organization that maintains the famed Doomsday Clock — asked why Congress, and most presidents too, view the Defense Department’s budget off limits when it comes time to discuss the nation’s spending.

The question is particularly relevant today since newly emboldened House Republicans are threatening to hold the nation’s debt ceiling hostage unless there are cuts in government spending.

But instead of scrutinizing a department that spends more than 17% of all the country’s money and is never audited, politicians target social safety net programs that chiefly benefit the needy and provide health and meal programs for kids. Or they target money earmarked to fight climate change and protect the environment. And to hear Joe Biden tell it, they’re secretly considering cuts in Social Security and Medicare, two federal programs that have always had their own source of funding.

Oh, there has been a proposal by some House Republicans to cut some defense money. But guess what? They would slash spending on programs they insist promote “wokeness” in the military. You know, efforts to promote diversity and to integrate the use of alternative fuels for its vehicles. All too costly, to hear them tell it.

Left untouched would be the real spending juggernauts that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists identified as wasteful and completely unnecessary. The group accuses the Pentagon of prioritizing the best interests of defense contractors over protecting the true national security.

Addressing these programs would in no way compromise the nation’s defense, nor would it imperil help for Ukraine and other trouble spots that involve the Defense Department.

“Smart cuts would stop production of major programs like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (an Air Force project extremely familiar to Madisonians) until testing is complete,” it said. “Proper oversight of the defense budget would also challenge bureaucratic growth that inevitably follows when new entities are created. (One good example is the Space Force, which some in Congress are already criticizing for mismanaging its procurement programs.)

“Nuclear spending is another area in which U.S. priorities have flown completely off the rails. Over the course of a single year, the cost estimate for the nuclear weapons activities budget increased by $113 billion,” the scientists reported.

A stark example of what the nonprofit watchdog was pointing to came in a recent front-page New York Times expose on how when even the Pentagon tried to cut a wasteful program, members of Congress stepped in to stop it.

The Pentagon last year came to the conclusion that eight of the 10 Freedom-class littoral combat ships now based in Jacksonville, Fla., and another based in San Diego, would be retired, even though the average age was 4 years while they had been built to last 25 years.

“The decision came after the ships, built in Wisconsin by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in partnership with Lockheed Martin, suffered a series of humiliating breakdowns, including repeated engine failures and technical shortcomings in an anti-submarine system intended to counter China’s growing naval capacity,” the story noted.

“We refused to put an additional dollar against that system that wouldn’t match the Chinese undersea threat,” Adm. Michael M. Gilday, chief of naval operations, told the Times. The Navy estimated that it could save $4.3 billion over the next five years by retiring them.

One of the problems with the ships is that they were ordered after the 9/11 attacks and designed to combat nontraditional threats, typically from terrorist groups. They were supposed to cost about $220 million each, but they took 12 years to build and wound up with a $500 million price tag for each one. And now, of course, the Navy has decided that it needs to return to more traditional threats.

According to the Times: “A consortium of players with economic ties to the ships — led by a trade association whose members had just secured contracts worth up to $3 billion to do repairs and supply work on them — mobilized to pressure Congress to block the plan, with phone calls, emails and visits to Washington to press lawmakers to intervene.”

At the front of the line were Republican lawmakers like Rob Wittman of Virginia and John Rutherford of Florida, two politicians who rail about the national debt. And the most hypocritical of all is Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the man who wants to sunset Social Security and Medicare every five years because, he contends, their costs are unsustainable.

When proposed cuts affect naval yards in their home state and districts, they suddenly become big proponents of spending, even if its wasteful.

“Lawmakers are acting like hoarders and forcing the services to keep stuff they don’t want and need,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a conservative group that seeks to limit government spending. “This is more about parochial concerns than defense priorities.”

There are many scenarios like this involving defense contracts, organizations like the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists insist.

But why ferret them out when it’s so much easier to cut programs for people who don’t have powerful lobbyists and money to lavish on campaign contributions?