Release: Khanna Votes No on NDAA Amendment to Add $37 Billion to the Defense Budget

Hearing

Today, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) gave remarks in the House Armed Services Committee's markup of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2023. He voted no on the National Defense Authorization Act topline amendment to add $37 billion to the United States defense budget.

A transcript of Rep. Khanna's remarks as delivered is below. Video of his remarks can be found here.

"I rise in opposition of this amendment. Part of me wonders when we are just going to get the amendment to have a trillion-dollar defense budget because it seems that's where we are going. I mean, every year they are basically adding 30 billion more to what the president wants, and I think that's what we really need to think of on this committee. If you're supporting this amendment, you're basically paving the way to a trillion-dollar defense. Is that what we want in this country? A trillion dollars more? More than a half of our discretionary budget is going into defense compared to all of the other needs, the security needs that this country has.

Now obviously, we have major threats -- with Russia on the Ukraine border, where the president has done an extraordinary job in rallying NATO and standing up for Ukraine and we passed on large bipartisan majorities support for Ukraine, the threat that China poses with Taiwan, but that doesn't mean that we need defense budgets that are more than they were at the height of the Cold War. That was a serious threat too, but we had the imagination and the innovation to be able to meet those threats without consuming over half our discretionary budget.

I just want to be clear -- there is no country in the world that is putting over half its discretionary budget into defense and I would rather for us to be the preeminent economy of the 21st century by investing in the health of our people, in the education of our people, in the industries of the future as we compete with China.

Let me just make one more point about China. You know what China is really doing in 2025? They're not putting all their money in defense. They have a "Made in China" initiative; they have a "Little Giants" initiative. You know what the "Little Giants" initiative is? It's four thousand start-ups that they think are in critical technologies that they're funding. They're funding their universities. They're producing engineers and scientists -- millions of them.

That's what's going to make America lose -- if we don't invest in the new technologies, if we don't invest in the new companies, if we don't invest in the new industries, if we don't make more things in America.

It is easy to just keep upping the defense budget in this committee. I trust President Biden, I would support his defense budget, but what requires more imagination is to actually get production back, to actually do the things that are going to make us win in the 21st century. That's why I oppose this amendment.

Source