Biden Administration Criticizes “House Freedom Caucus” Defense Spending Budget Proposal. Does Not Mention Concerns About Support For Ukraine. Does Mention China.

The White House
Washington DC
24 March 2023

(emphasis as per the original text)

FIVE-ALARM FIRE: The House Freedom Caucus’ Extreme Budget Proposal Weakens Our National Security

The extreme MAGA Republican House Freedom Caucus has made their priorities clear: imposing devastating cuts that would weaken national security and increasing costs for working- and middle-class families, all to protect and extend tax breaks skewed to the wealthy and big corporations. In fact, their tax cuts would be so expensive that their deep and harmful cuts would not reduce the deficit.
 
That’s in sharp contrast with the President’s Budget, which invests in America, lowers costs for families, protects and strengthens Medicare and Social Security, and reduces the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years, while ensuring no one making less than $400,000 per year pays a penny more in new taxes.
 
Combined with other commitments extreme MAGA House Republicans have already made, the extreme Freedom Caucus proposal will be a disaster for families in at least five key ways: endangering public safety, raising costs for families, shipping manufacturing jobs overseas and undermining American workers, weakening national security, and hurting seniors.
 
Last week, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed that Congressional Republicans’ budget math doesn’t add up. CBO found that—in order to meet Congressional Republicans’ stated commitment to balancing the budget in 10 years without raising taxes on the wealthy or corporations, and without cutting Social Security, Medicare, defense, and some veterans’ benefits—Congressional Republicans would need to eliminate everything in the rest of the Federal budget.

The extreme MAGA Republican House Freedom Caucus proposal will be a five-alarm fire for families—including by weakening our national security with drastic cuts. Their proposals will:

• Undermine Military Readiness. The extreme MAGA Republican House Freedom Caucus proposes to turn back the clock on defense funding and impose inflation-adjusted cuts each year going forward. Their proposal could amount to a roughly $600 billion reduction in funding for national defense over just the next five years compared to the President’s Budget—undermining military readiness, weakening our deterrence against China, and impeding our ability to meet pressing global challenges, both now and in the future.  

• Damage Efforts to Deter China. The extreme MAGA Republican House Freedom Caucus plan would degrade and delay the Department of Defense’s efforts to increase capabilities, infrastructure, influence and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific theater. The House Freedom Caucus’s cuts, when applied to defense, would jeopardize crucial elements of the Department’s strategy in the region, including investments in the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and the development and procurement of critical munitions like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile and the Standard Missle-6.  

• Set Back the Navy and the Air Force. Funding for the Department of Defense at the levels implied by the extreme MAGA Republican House Freedom Caucus plan could force the Navy to cut at least two capital ships, eliminating a new Virginia class submarine and a new DDG-51 destroyer. The cuts would likely cause significant disruption and delays to the B-21 bomber program, which is now starting to enter production.   

• Weaken Our Economic Competitiveness with China. The President believes future technology should be invented in America and manufactured in America. The extreme MAGA Republican House Freedom Caucus proposal would mean the future is invented and developed overseas, putting America behind other countries like China at a time when the United States has fallen to ninth in the world in investments in research and development while China has risen to second. The extreme MAGA Republican House Freedom Caucus proposal would cut innovation funding authorized in the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, resulting in 2,200 fewer research awards from the National Science Foundation alone in technologies critical to economic competitiveness and national security like advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, biotechnologies, and artificial intelligence. This would cut support to more than 31,000 researchers, students, and others—undermining our national security and global competitiveness at a moment when America’s competitors continue to increase investment in these technologies.