‘Constant misinformation from the president is a real problem in a democratic society, and we in Congress have got to do our best to hold him accountable,” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who assumes chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee in January.
Smith was reacting to a tally of inaccurate claims by President Donald Trump, in speeches or tweets, on issues military people and veterans care about, such as the relative size of pay raises, the purpose of border deployments, assertions of readiness in disarray before he became president, and his premature claims of expanded health care choices for veterans who rely on the VA medical system.
The latest occurred during Trump’s brief visit with U.S. troops in Iraq on Dec. 26, when he said again, as he had last May, that “the big pay raise you just got” — 2.4 percent last January, a 2.6 percent increase to take effect next month — was the first raise in “more than 10 years,” according to a White House transcript.
And Trump added, falsely, that the military raise was 10 percent.
On Dec. 12, following an hour-long press breakfast hosted by the Defense Writers Group, Smith warned that a new Democratic majority in the House no longer will allow Trump misstatements targeting troops to slide.
At the breakfast Smith also said the House committee with Democratic majority will resist some declared presidential plans for the Department of Defense, including creation of a Space Force and a 5 percent bump in defense spending next year, which Trump embraced this month, reversing an earlier call for cuts.
On Space Force, Smith said, there is “bipartisan concern about creating a separate branch of the military.” Even Defense officials, he said, weren’t “crazy about Space Force until the president decided we had to have one … But they know this isn’t the best way.”
On securing the border with Mexico, Smith said Trump’s deployment of active duty forces before last November’s elections as a caravan of immigrants approached seeking asylum, was an “optics thing…to make people believe this is an invasion and a huge problem.” It was “a misuse of our troops.”
Trump “misunderstands the problem,” Smith added. Democrats agree that border security is important. Over the last dozen years, the border security budget quintupled, resulting in “a significant decline in unlawful border crossings,” he said.
“We’ve had Guard and Reserve troops down there…We’ve built a wall; the president seems to have missed that. [But] on a lot of the property where the president wants [more] wall, some of it is tribal land, some of it is privately owned land, some of it is like 10,000 feet high so you’re not going to put a wall up there.”
“The challenge we are facing now is different. It’s asylum seekers. You don’t need to build more security because folks are not trying to sneak in. They are turning themselves in [to get] through the process. I don’t deny there has been a significant increase in people seeking asylum but the solution to that is not to harden the border. The solution is to hire more judges and expedite the process.” Trump, Smith said, misstates the challenge to stoke fear.
Smith said he agrees with Democratic colleagues that defense spending needs to be brought into balance with spending on domestic programs.
The Republican approach to national security “is to point out all the areas where we don’t have enough capability and say we have to spend more money,” Smith said. Under current “strategy we have to win a war with China and Russia, preferably simultaneously. We have to stop North Korea. And do all this stuff that, frankly, adds up to more money than we possibly have.
“We can’t do everything,” Smith said.
Trump earlier this year ordered all federal departments, including Defense, to cut budgets for 2020 by five percent. He even tweeted in early December that the $716 billion in defense spending authorized for 2019 was “crazy.”
The next day, however, Trump met with Defense Secretary James Mattis and top Republicans on the armed services committee, and agreed to back $750 billion for defense in 2020 — $27 billion more than DoD projected before Trump directed a department budget cut of five percent.
Smith noted that the nation’s debt had reached $22 trillion and would soon be climbing by $1 trillion annually if Congress doesn’t act. Interest on the debt will surpass the size of the defense budget this fiscal year, Smith said. The debt “hangs over everything” because there’s not “money to do what we’d all like to do” including repair bridges, roads and other deteriorating infrastructure.
To comment, write Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA, 20120 or email milupdate@aol.com or twitter: Tom Philpott @Military_Update
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
