We’re Never Broke for War
What “We Can’t Afford It” Means in Washington
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SUMMARY
The federal government is not running out of money. When Congress needs to fund a military package, emergency mechanisms can move tens of billions on fast timelines that domestic policy hardly gets. When Americans ask for childcare, housing, or healthcare, we’re told the country can’t afford it.
In April of 2003, Congress passed a $78.5 billion emergency supplemental appropriations bill for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Roughly $62 billion of it was directed toward Iraq operations.
It moved quickly over a few weeks, the request submitted March 25th, signed into law April 16th.
That same year, Congress debated for months over a $400 billion Medicare prescription drug bill and passed it only after an arm-twisting session that kept the House floor open for nearly three hours past the deadline, in what remains one of the most controversial votes in recent legislative history.
That contrast is not a coincidence and once you see how it works, you can’t hear the phrase we can’t afford it the same way again.
Here’s what the budget does.
Congress funds the government through multiple channels like annual appropriations, continuing resolutions, and a third tool: supplemental appropriations. Emergency funding, outside the normal cycle, often labeled as national security.
Emergency designations are frequently structured to operate outside standard discretionary caps and offset requirements… the rules that force lawmakers to “pay for” domestic spending with cuts somewhere else.
They can move through Congress at a speed that legislation rarely achieves.
For fiscal year 2024, CBO analysis put the defense discretionary topline at roughly $886 billion.
That figure doesn’t fully capture nuclear programs housed in the Department of Energy, veteran care, or interest on past military debt.
Recent examples include major supplemental packages for Ukraine, Israel, and Indo-Pacific defense priorities.
Whether you support those specific policies or not, the procedural reality is identical every time, that when something wears the label of national security, fiscal restraint arguments soften or disappear.
Now ask what happens when Americans need something closer to home.
Even the Department of Education’s discretionary budget is a fraction of the Pentagon’s annual topline.
Housing assistance programs carry waitlists that stretch years.
Childcare support expansions are debated for months over projected costs.
Disaster relief funding triggers offset fights that delay aid to people who have already lost everything.
This is the result of decades of deliberate political incentive.
Voting for defense spending carries almost no political risk.
Defense contracts support jobs in nearly every congressional district in the country.
“Soft on security” attacks remain among the most potent in American politics, and lawmakers have built entire careers on never casting that particular vote.
The same dollar amount that becomes an “urgent security investment” in one context becomes “unsustainable spending” or an “entitlement handout” in another.
Language shapes outcomes. A dollar is whatever story gets told about it… a dollar is not a dollar in Washington.
Your neighbors are already noticing this even if they can’t name it yet.
Political scientists have a term for what happens when citizens repeatedly observe government responsiveness diverge by policy domain: differential agenda access.
This is when one category of spending consistently clears procedural hurdles that another category can’t, the institutional bias becomes visible even to people who have never read a budget resolution.
Research on democratic legitimacy consistently identifies procedural fairness, the perception that rules apply equally as a stronger driver of institutional trust than policy outcomes.
When the same Congress that invokes fiscal discipline for Medicaid expansion moves a defense supplemental in three weeks, the credibility of the fiscal discipline argument erodes across the institution.
The federal budget is not a zero-sum ledger, it is an authorization framework shaped by political will, and political will is not fixed.
The House and Senate Appropriations Committees control the allocation framework through the annual budget resolution and the twelve individual appropriations bills that flow from it.
The Budget Committees set the overall discretionary caps that determine how much each subcommittee has to work with.
Supplemental negotiations, which move fast and often outside normal order, are one of the few windows where sustained public pressure can shift outcomes before a vote is called.
These are committees with members, members with constituents, and constituents with primary elections.
The federal government has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it can move significant resources quickly when the political will to do so exists.
That will is constructed.
And it can be reconstructed.
The next time you hear we can’t afford it, ask…
Can’t afford it or chose not to prioritize it?
What’s a domestic need you wish received the same urgency as a defense package?
Universal healthcare. Equitable.
Universal healthcare