Washington Wednesday: Bringing debate back to defense funding

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 19th of July, 2023. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It is Washington Wednesday once again, and today we have the Senate wrestling over defense spending.

When House Republicans last week narrowly passed their defense bill, Democrats accused Republicans of politicizing national defense by injecting culture war issues.

REICHARD: But GOP lawmakers insist that they are instead trying to remove social politics from Pentagon funding. Senator Tom Cotton:

TOM COTTON: The military should not be paying for abortion tourism or diversity consultants or sex change operations. They should be buying the weapons that we need to defend our nation and to support our troops.

REICHARD: The House bill would strip funding for what Republicans say are the radical left-wing social policies of the Biden Defense Department.

EICHER: Joining us now is Victoria Coates. She has senior experience across the U.S. government, including at the White House, where she served as a deputy national security advisor to President Trump.

REICHARD: Victoria, good morning!

VICTORIA COATES: Good morning, Mary.

REICHARD: Let’s talk about some of the controversial policies within the Biden Defense Department. Some of our listeners might not even be aware that they exist. Let’s start with funding for abortion travel. What’s that about?

COATES: It's fascinating. When the Supreme Court decision on abortion came down, that Pentagon issued a memo an official memo declaring their policy to be that they will provide financial support for either service women or female family members of service men to travel to have abortions and recover from them. And this is not something I could have envisioned when working on the NDAA as a as a Senate staffer, 10 years ago, that this would be an issue we would have to confront. But because the administration has so politicized the Pentagon, because they have declared this to be their official policy, I think the Congress had no choice but to respond and say that, that this is intolerable, that this is not a responsible use of US taxpayer dollars going to the Department of Defense, and interestingly, one of the lead co sponsors of that amendment, Dr. Ronnie Jackson, rather, he has been a military doctor for decades. So he has served, he knows exactly what he's talking about. And he says, This is just this is just wrong. This is not the business of the United States military. And just recently, we had Admiral Kirby at the White House podium declaring it the sacred obligation of the Pentagon to provide abortions, which is is just an extraordinary assumption of responsibility, you know, that it's not an option, it's not a choice, as as many like to say about the procedure, but it's an obligation for the US military to do this.

REICHARD: Another thing is funding for transgender procedures. The Biden administration wants taxpayer dollars to pay for that as well?

Well, let's talk about funding for transgender procedures, taxpayer dollars are paying for that, too.

COATES: Yeah, it's been that's, that's what the Pentagon would like is to make gender change procedures available to the military. And Kirby addressed that as well. He said that if you undergo these, these procedures, and you are fit mentally and physically to serve, you can continue to serve. And so again, this is simply not the function of the military. You know, if if a consenting adult wishes to undergo these these procedures, that's their business, but it is not the obligation of the United States military to pay for them. It has nothing to do with war fighting, or defending our nation effectively.

REICHARD: Do you know, Victoria, if the military pays for plastic surgery, for example, I'm trying to think of other kinds of procedures that the military would not cover?

COATES: Right, elective procedures, I think only I mean, obviously, the the military will pay for plastic surgery if you're injured and require it. So that I think is an important distinction, but an elective nose job, or whatever it may be absolutely not, that would not be considered actual health care, it would be considered a choice. And these things are as well and again, have nothing to do with the core mission of DOD.

REICHARD: Something else that Senator Cotton mentioned: diversity consultants and training. What does that mean and what’s changed from the Trump administration to the Biden administration?

COATES: Yeah, this is really a disease that has crept into the military is this entire class of consultants that are currently being hired on the taxpayer dime to come in and improve the social makeup of the military. So it's runs from things that are necessary, like sexual harassment training, which I think is an important safeguard to put into place, to these these wild diversity programs that that you read about, and you think this can't possibly be real, you know, where, you know, white men are required to, you know, sort of shame themselves publicly for their privilege, and others are allowed to describe how white privilege of these of these men makes them feel. And then the requirements to get what they consider to be the proper makeup for the military into place, which can mean that a less capable person because they have a more desirable identity could be promoted. And so we don't have our most capable people doing the most critical tasks of defending our nation, and this has ballooned Mary to the point where I've had service members tell me that huge amounts of their time are taken up going to these programs, which once again have nothing to do with war fighting or keeping our nation safe.

REICHARD: We did see a faction of Republicans tried to cut funding for the war in Ukraine. They didn't succeed in doing that. Victoria, is the divide on that issue growing?

COATES: Well, I think the funding for the war in Ukraine is something the administration has to face. The problem that we have here is we've been at this now for over 500 days since Putin invaded Ukraine for what was supposed to be a three day war. So somebody seriously miscalculated. And the brief that the Congress got with at the time of the original invasion was that our plan was to arm an insurgency and support the Government of Ukraine in exile, which would have been one set of obligations for the US taxpayer. But it became clear, certainly by this time, that last year, if not sooner, that this was no such thing. And we were getting into the position of being the lead donor by leaps and bounds to the Ukrainian military cause, but not just to the Ukrainian military cause, but also to civil society issues in Ukraine. The President said this spring that we're going to put something in the pocket of every Ukrainian. And I think that's when a lot of American head sort of tilted to one side and said, Well, I don't know.

REICHARD: What else did you find noteworthy about the House defense bill?

COATES: I found it noteworthy how strong the bill was that pretty much all of the points raised by the Freedom Caucus, got in there or got out of there. And Speaker McCarthy really held firm on it. And so he deserves a lot of credit. I think there were assumptions going in on the part of the Freedom Caucus that he would probably try to cave or create a watered down bill. And there was really a moment of legislative crisis where that almost happened where he put together what we call a package, a group of amendments that were very middle of the road and noncontroversial and was going to make that the only amendments that would be voted upon there was sort of a revolt on the right, everybody was holding their breath to see if you know if there would be a sort of a movement to undermine the speaker. And cooler heads prevailed and the decision was made that, you know, the American people gave us the majority in the House, and that these are actually common sense ways to get the social issues out of the Pentagon. And so as I said, credit to the speaker for getting pretty much every conservative priority into this, or out of this legislation, and getting it through holding his caucus together enough. And so we now have to wait and see what the Senate cooks up. So that this is far from over. But that was what really caught my attention about about how this bill proceeded.

REICHARD: Now that the debate has shifted to the Senate— do you think the measures can survive that strip funding for things like abortion travel and transgender procedures?

COATES: It'll be interesting to see what the Democrats decide they really want to fight on. And how many of these they want to have a vote on. If they materially alter the bill, then they got to send it back to the house. I mean, we could be playing ping pong for a long time. I've seen it happen before. So you know, they're gonna have to prioritize whether they want to go on record as being the party that wants to spend your taxpayer dollars on abortions, on gender change, on DEI, training? Or do they want to be the party that supports robust, a robust funding for our military to do the job of the military? So I think I think that'll be an interesting question for many of them to answer.

REICHARD: Final question here, Victoria, what are the top bipartisan priorities with regard to defense spending right now?

COATES: Well, I mean, those those actually are pretty positive. There is robust bipartisan support for modernizing our nuclear facilities, all the legs of our nuclear triad, which definitely needs to happen. There is robust bipartisan support for funding for Israel's military, which, you know, has been somewhat in question in recent days because of some statements of some progressive members of the House, but I think very encouragingly, many Democrats have come out and rejected that and supported the funding that goes into the NDAA. So those would be two areas where I think we've been particularly pleased from a Heritage Foundation perspective that we do see, you know, broad majorities in Congress, which means broad majorities of the American people supporting what's in the NDAA.

REICHARD: Victoria Coates has been our guest. She is a senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation. Victoria, thanks so much.

COATES: Thank you, Mary.

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