Are you claiming that Ukraine funding is an investment in American industry and good for the economy?
What I’m claiming is the Ukraine funding bill contains the money to ramp up production to cover the shells, missiles and other items we’ve shipped or will ship. Without it the US is not only NOT building material our military needs, but we run the risk of funding for present contracts to American manufacturers running out. This will lead to layoffs when our inventory is low. It will be difficult to recover from layoffs in an industry where it is difficult to replace specialized skills. The level of misplaced disgust and lack of understanding of this situation is mind-bending.
FR thread—— Biden Admits Massively Undercounting Ukraine Aid
When conservatives in Congress pressed the Biden admin to provide the real cost of the Ukraine war in Jan 2023, the lawmakers estimated the U.S. had spent “a minimum of $114 billion.”
<><>Now, with added OMB information, Cong Vance and company estimate the current total to Ukraine amounts to at least $125 billion—$14 billion over what the OMB had previously claimed.
<><>That’s not all.....Biden could give Ukraine another $4B billion via weapons transfers from US stockpiles under Presidential Drawdown Authority.
<><>This would bring the total amount to Ukraine to $129 billion.
When Biden’s OMB got around to responding almost eight months later, the OMB claimed, through an opaque and admittedly incomplete data sheet, that Ukraine aid totaled $111 billion.
<><>“The deficiencies in OMB’s response were numerous,” said of the OMB’s Sept 2023 response.
<><>“did not account for 100’s of millions of dollars in base appropriations for Ukraine’s Security Assistance Initiative.
<><>It omitted the administration’s ‘$6.2 billion in ‘freed-up’ authority’ to send weapons to Ukraine,
<><>which meant that ‘certain numbers in OMB’s spreadsheet, as well as dollar figures the administration provided for at least some previous Ukraine-related drawdowns, are outdated.’
<><>It did not allow us to determine ‘what obligations, apportionments, and outlays the administration has undertaken for other countries in response to the Ukraine conflict.’”
Cong Vance and company concluded Biden OMB’s Sept 2023 response was “nonresponsive.” In a follow-up letter sent September 28, 2023, they added that
<><>“If OMB’s spreadsheet is to be relied on to produce such a figure—and we believe it cannot be—it is around $111 billion.
<><>It would appear likely that the data you have yet to provide would raise this figure by an indeterminate magnitude.
“Every one of these assertions has been validated,” the Tuesday letter claims. On March 8, 2024, “nearly six months after we again requested a full accounting of Ukraine spending, more than a year after our original request, and one business day before the OMB director was scheduled to testify before the Senate Budget Committee,” the letter notes, OMB finally decided to hand over “another tranche of information.” What it included was shocking.
<><>The latest OMB data to Congress revealed, according to the lawmakers’ letter,
<><>Biden failed to report at least another $684 million in appropriated Ukraine spending,
<><>left out another $900 million in DOD assistance connected to the Ukraine war,
<><>and a number of other pitfalls that has undercounted the total amount of Ukraine aid by a magnitude of billions.
There could be more, too, as lawmakers included a list of 14 probing questions and information requests in their latest correspondence with the OMB director.
No surprise—it’s not Joe Biden’s money at stake........ just the American people’s tax dollars.
Bradley Devlin is the political editor for The American Conservative. Previously, he was an Analysis Reporter for the Daily Caller, and has been published in the Daily Wire and the Daily Signal, among other publications that don’t include the word “Daily.” He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Political Economy. You can follow Bradley on Twitter @bradleydevlin.