Just days before the new year, President Joe Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2023 into law. One of the last actions he took in 2022 was to approve an $858 billion budget for weapons and war.
The NDAA is an annual bill, passed by Congress and signed into law by presidents, that authorizes spending for the Pentagon. And every year, Congress and presidents add more and more money to the Pentagon budget at the expense of communities across the country – all for fighter jets that don’t stay in the air, dangerous nuclear weapons, and all kinds of giveaways to corrupt defense contractors. 2023 could finally be the year for us to reverse this deadly trend.
We need to get to work right away because while the NDAA may be voted on and signed into law in December, negotiations on what actually goes into the bill begin early in the calendar year. Major decisions on next year’s (2024) NDAA priorities could very well be decided this upcoming year around February or March. That’s just a few weeks from now.
We're sending a message to President Biden right now that we do not want another unnecessarily inflated Pentagon budget.