Trump’s defense budget is “basically the Obama approach with a little bit more, but not much." - Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), chair of the House Armed Services Committee.
The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, a two-year budget agreement that Trump signed into law Feb. 9, set the budget authority for national defense at $700 billion in fiscal year 2018 and $716 billion in fiscal 2019. The budget authority for national defense was larger in nominal dollars, which are not adjusted for inflation, in 2010 ($721 billion) and in 2011 ($717 billion). That’s according to the White House’s own Office of Management and Budget, “Total, National Defense,Table 5.1." Obama's share of GDP was higher too.
The Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) reduced projected levels of defense spending by $406 billion over the past five years. While it is true that the BCA has affected defense capability somewhat, its effect has been mitigated by two factors. First, Congress granted the Department of Defense more than $200 billion in relief between 2013 and 2017 from the spending caps; and the FY 2018 base defense budget exceeds the caps by another $100 billion. Second, the Pentagon has used the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), or warfighting, account to get around the caps. According to the Department of Defense comptroller, about half of the OCO account has funded Pentagon programs that have nothing to do with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, the European Deterrence Initiative has been funded in the OCO account since FY 2017, when the Pentagon received $3.4 billion for it. The Pentagon admits that even with the large increase in the FY 2019 base budget, $17 billion of this year’s OCO account contains items normally funded in the base budget.
For the second year in a row, the Trump administration has paid for the defense increases by slashing funding for the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development by nearly 30 percent, or $16 billion total, a decision that 150 retired generals say will weaken U.S. national security.
Nine countries now meet the goal that NATO set in 2014 that each member direct at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product toward their own military by 2024. Overall, European allies' spending has risen from $272 billion in 2014 to $313 billion last year – part of a slow and steady increase that actually started three years before Trump assumed the presidency.
Rosatom by purchasing Uranium One gained control of "10 percent of the currently licensed uranium in-situ recovery production capacity” in the United States. But that doe not mean 20 percent of U.S. uranium reserves. Total U.S. production in 2017 is expected to be less than 1,000 tons — and production in 2016 was just 1,126 tons. In 2016, its Willow Creek facility extracted just 23 tons. That’s 2.3 percent of all U.S. production. In 2015, the project represented 3.6 percent of U.S. production By contrast, Uranium One’s mines in Kazakhstan alone extracted nearly 3,000 tons in 2016. Total worldwide uranium recovery in 2016 was 62,266 tons.
