Today, the Senate Appropriations Committee advanced a handful of spending bills out of committee, including the Pentagon spending bill, which appropriates $851.7 billion for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, a 3.3 percent increase over last year.

With this bill, appropriators are willfully ignoring the budget caps agreed to last year, which capped spending at 1 percent above last year’s budget. In order to circumvent those caps without breaking the law, they characterized $21 billion in the bill as “emergency spending,” a tried-and-true method of ignoring budget constraints.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, framed this legislative sleight of hand as necessary to address “historically low defense spending.”

This framing is at odds with reality.

The senator’s assertion is based on the fact that as a percentage of GDP, we spend less on the Pentagon than we used to. However, this framework obfuscates the fact that in terms of, you know, actual money, adjusting for inflation, the Pentagon budget ballooned from $506 billion in 1980 to $820 billion in 2023—a 62 percent jump. Most of that jump, nearly 50 percent, took place since the turn of the century, underscoring the accelerating pace of Pentagon spending.

Using percentage of GDP is helpful for understanding the size of the nation’s debt relative to other years. In other words, what is the nation’s debt relative to the size of the economy. Pentagon spending on the other hand should be dictated by the nation’s needs and strategy, not by the size of the economy. But we digress.

Further eroding the legitimacy of this Pentagon spending spree, the bill includes significant funding for the Pentagon’s so-called “unfunded priorities,” extrabudgetary wish lists of items the Pentagon did not include in its base budget request. As we’ve said before, these lists erode the normal budget process, casting aside the holistic approach to national security budgeting reflected in the Pentagon’s actual budget request in favor of cherry-picked projects that help lawmakers funnel money into their districts, often at the expense of actual priorities included in the budget request.

Sen. Collins also boasted that the bill significantly boosts funding above the President’s budget request to support the military-industrial base, calling it a “just-in-case” approach to national security spending. This approach appears to be doubling down on a recommendation made earlier this year in the Pentagon’s National Defense Industrial Strategy, which called for maintaining excess production capacity—essentially paying companies to maintain production capacity beyond what current demand signals call for. That’s a great deal for Pentagon contractors, who are essentially being paid to sit on their hands. It’s a bad deal for taxpayers.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be digging into this bill and the House’s version to see just how many “program increases” lawmakers tacked on and at what exorbitant cost to taxpayers. Last year, lawmakers added $21 billion to the Pentagon’s procurement and research accounts alone spread out over more than 1,000 separate increases. This year, despite budget caps, we expect there will be even more.