For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. The one who serves Christ in this way is acceptable to God and has human approval. Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding. – Rom 14.17-19

This Good Friday, the White House published the president’s FY 2027 budget request, which is a top-level fiscal blueprint meant to guide Congress’s yearly budget negotiations. The President’s fiscal guidance includes an unprecedented spending request of $1.5 Trillion for the Pentagon, a figure that may well include the $200 Billion the Administration requested last month to help fund the War in Iran. Call on Congress today to reject the White House’s runaway militarism and instead reinvest the U.S.’s considerable wealth toward the care of the most vulnerable at home and abroad.

Ordinarily, the Pentagon’s already wasteful and severely bloated budget increases by 5-9% each year. This year’s request would increase Pentagon funding by 50% and make the U.S. responsible for half of all global military spending for the first time. The U.S. already so vastly out-spends the countries with the next highest military spending (China ~$250 Billion and Russia ~$190 Billion) that increases in our Pentagon yearly budget only signal the growing gap between credible security threats and our spiritual addiction to war and militarism.

Under current tax law, the money will have to come from further cuts to healthcare; food and housing assistance; funds for clean air, water, and land; and poverty relief. Every state in the U.S. could fully fund its Medicaid and SNAP obligations many times over by rejecting the proposed increase in the Pentagon’s budget. The poor, sick, hungry, and unhoused should not have to forego their basic needs in order to pay for unnecessary military waste.

As Presbyterians, we know that real peace and security in a violent world only come as nations ground themselves in God’s reconciliation in Jesus Christ and pursue the practical politics of cooperation and international understanding (Confession of 1967, 9.45b). A decade and a half ago, we lamented that the “base funding of the Department of Defense [was] more than 10 times that of the State Department and USAID.” (Human Rights Update, 220th GA, 2012) The Pentagon’s current budget request instead risks further violence and suffering, condemning “a growing number of people to lives of poverty or fear” by “bankrupting the U.S. economy and creating additional structural violence or oppression.” (“Risking Peace in a Violent World: Five New Peacemaking Affirmations—From the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy 222nd GA, 2016)

In faithfulness to the God who this Easter-tide is at work swallowing up violence and death and reconciling the world to Godself, demand that Congress reject the Pentagon’s reckless budget requests and reinvest in the needs of the most vulnerable.