April 23, 2021

Today, East Bay Peace Action has signed on to the letter below to allies in Congress, asking them to send a letter to relevant committee chairs expressing opposition to the proposed $753 billion military budget.

To: Rep. John Yarmouth, Chair, House Budget Committee; Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Chair, House Appropriations Committee; Rep. Betty McCollum, Chair, House Defense Subcommittee; Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Chair, House Energy Subcommittee; Rep. Adam Smith, Chair, House Armed Services Committee; Senator Bernie Sanders, Chair, Senate Budget Committee; Senator Patrick Leahy, Chair, Senate Appropriations Committee; Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chair, Senate Subcommittee on Energy; Senator Jack Reed, Chair, Senate Armed Services Committee; Senator John Tester, Chair, Senate Defense Subcommittee.

Dear Committee and Subcommittee Chairs:

As members of the United States Congress sent to Washington to provide oversight and serve our constituents, we stand united in our opposition to the proposed increased $753 billion military budget and urge you to reduce the military budget by at least 10% , exempting military pay and benefits, before the budget leaves your committee.

It is time to shift to a human-centered definition of security that prioritizes the urgent needs of those highlighted in the Poor People’s Campaign for a moral budget. The campaign points out that 87-million Americans lack adequate health care coverage, eleven million people are houseless, 35 million are food insecure and one in three Black and Latinx households are steeped in debt. .

We call for re-evaluating US priorities to reduce Pentagon and Department of Energy spending to instead invest in health care, education, housing, climate sustainability, racial justice and more. We call this the Peace Dividend: increased investment in public goods as the result of winding down US wars.

With President Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and his review of the necessity of 800 overseas bases in 80 countries, we expect and hope to spend less, not more on the military. We reject a proposed US pivot to Asia that increases troop deployments to the South China Sea, opens new military bases, and greenlights nuclear warships and mock nuclear strikes–all of which threaten to provoke another war, this one with a nuclear armed nation.

We stand united in opposition to spending billions of dollars in 2022, $1.7 trillion over the next decades, to develop new nuclear weapons that will escalate the arms race, increase the odds of a catastrophic accident and risk global annihilation.

Respectfully, we ask committee chairs preparing the military budget to remove expenditures for new nuclear weapons from the base bill or any document that merges with an overall budget bill, scrap the euphemistically titled “nuclear modernization” plan that fails to reflect modern thinking on the imperative of peace in the midst of a global climate crisis, budget to begin closing some overseas bases and re-evaluate billions of dollars for a US Space Force that will also escalate the arms race.

Again, we stand strongly united in our request that you reduce military spending for the Fiscal Year 2022 budget by a minimum of 10 percent before allocations are embedded in a final budget bill.

Sincerely,
Progressive Democrats of America
World BEYOND War
Greenpeace US
Rainforest Action Network
CODEPINK
Our Revolution
RootsAction.org
Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace
Veterans For Peace
World Beyond War-Central Florida
Rooms for PEACE
Seattle Anti-War Coalition
Massachusetts Peace Action
Women Against Military Madness
United We Dream Network
Peace, Justice,  Sustainability NOW
Nuclear Free World Committee
Dallas Peace and Justice Center
Peace Farm
War Resisters League
Witness for Peace Southwest
Green Party of Pima County
NH Veterans for Peace
Veterans For Peace Chapter 154
Veterans For Peace Chapter 181
Veterans For Peace – Santa Fe Chapter