Foreign Policy

A Responsible Defense Budget

November 13, 2015

This week former senator Tom Coburn and William Ruger, vice president of research and policy at Stand Together Trust discussed how the Department of Defense can responsibly curb spending without jeopardizing national security in an op-ed for USA Today. As they write:

“Yet as long as we keep talking about adding to the budget without first asking what we’re paying for, we undercut any wide-scale incentive on the part of defense officials to take these things seriously. As the GAO itself noted, ‘too often we report the same kinds of problems today that we did over 20 years ago.’ The budget cap is a modest but meaningful attempt to incentivize more serious thinking about getting more bang for the buck. We can’t retreat now or we will again be raising these problems in another 20 years.”

Read the full op-ed at USA Today