While DOGE may have saved $160 billion so far, the Pentagon now ‘needs’ $150 billion of new funding under the guise of supporting various Trump priorities.

The House Armed Services Committee advanced the supplemental spending plan on Tuesday in a 35-21 vote during a markup hearing.

The plan was unveiled on April 27 by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS), with Congressional Republicans preparing it for reconciliation – a process which allows Congress to pass legislation concerning taxation and government spending without requiring the 60 Senate votes typically needed to invoke cloture and avoid a filibuster.

Republicans have several such reconciliation bills in the pipeline.

The military spending bill will now be added to a broader continuing resolution to fund the federal government through the remainder of FY2025. 

It provides $25 billion this year for Trump’s plan to overhaul the US missile defense network, as laid out in Trump’s January executive order calling for an “Iron Dome for America.”

As the Epoch Times notes further, other top priorities in the military spending supplemental include $34 billion to boost shipbuilding and $21 billion to replenish depleted munitions stockpiles.

Earlier this month, Trump signed executive orders aiming to boost U.S. shipbuilding and arms procurement capabilities.

The proposal also assigns around $14 billion for various innovation projects, including low-cost attritable weapons systems, $13 billion for efforts to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and $12 billion for general readiness projects like base infrastructure projects and efforts to boost stocks of spare parts.

Another $11 billion would go toward the U.S. military’s Pacific components to conduct training exercises and bolster regional defenses.

Another $7 billion would support various projects to enhance existing aircraft and develop new ones.

This would include $400 million to boost the development of the recently announced F-47 stealth fighter jet.

Border security would also get a spending boost.

The supplemental lays out $5 billion for Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security efforts to prevent illegal border crossings, and to conduct immigration and counter-drug enforcement operations.

The bill calls for around $9 billion more for quality of life improvements for military personnel and their families.

The additional funding would increase allowances for housing, health care, and family assistance programs.

Opening the April 29 markup hearing, Rogers said: “The time for this level of investment is long overdue.”

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), by contrast, cast doubts as to whether the Defense Department could make efficient use of the new funding.

Smith, who is the committee’s ranking member, said: “I cannot support throwing another $150 billion that I absolutely guarantee you will not be well spent.”

Democrats on the House committee’s minority submitted 21 amendments to the Republican-led reconciliation bill, all of which failed to make it in.

One amendment that Smith offered called for all but 25 percent of the new funds to remain locked up until Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth orders a review of policies and procedures for handling classified and sensitive information.

Smith and other committee Democrats used the hearing to reiterate concerns about recent incidents in which Hegseth discussed military operations on the Signal messaging application.

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) also offered an amendment to reduce Hegseth’s salary to $1.

Ryan submitted yet another amendment to block any of the funds described in the military spending reconciliation bill from being made available to business entities operated by special government employees.

Billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been advising the Trump administration and has been designated as a special government employee.

Committee Democrats offered other amendments to block the Department of Defense from relieving senior officers of their commands or terminating different groups of civilian employees.

Other amendments would have made much of the proposed funds contingent on the completion of a successful department financial audit, a task the department has failed to achieve in the past seven consecutive years it has tried.

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

When you buy those beautiful cupcakes and cookies at the grocery store, how much plastic are you eating? This is a burning question these days, as Americans have become newly aware of the real content of mainstream food.

MIT professor Retsef Levi has produced remarkable research detailing the extent of the problem of petroleum food dyes in normal products you eat every day. He did an analysis of 700K products in the USDA Global Branded Food Products Database and found over 85K products with at least one dye and some categories having well over 50 percent of products with at least one dye.

As is well known, these products have been credibility associated with behavioral disorders in the young and carcinogens in adults, which is why most countries in the world do not use them. Many dispute those findings, and arguments run in all directions. But these days, there is great concern about chronic disease in the young and a strong effort to address the issue through every means.

It makes sense that U.S. producers align themselves more with natural rather than synthetic dyes. It’s rather remarkable that the practice has continued as long as it has. Foreign travelers in the United States fear U.S. food in part for this reason. They would rather eat food, not plastic, and worry about what is really in our bright, delicious-looking, packaged foods.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at HHS and Dr. Marty Makary at the FDA have taken aim at six of these dyes (in addition to two already identified under the last administration) and have scheduled them to be phased out as part of the agenda to make America healthy again. In this, they have faced remarkably little pushback. Few are willing to stand up in defense of synthetic dyes in our food and most people have a sense that we would be better off without.

This is why so far, the agreements to get rid of them are voluntary. They rely on cooperative understandings with industry rather than mandates. This seems right to me.

I’m of a libertarian cast of mind and generally feel like people should eat whatever they want. It’s up to the consumer and not government to decide such questions. Producers should use whatever ingredients customers want, and it does seem as if these products on the ban list have more or less been approved by the consumer marketplace.

In principle, I agree with Jeffrey Singer: “The HHS and FDA regulatory monopolies should not infringe on adults’ autonomy to choose less expensive or more visually appealing foods containing these substances, if they wish. Autonomous adults must have the freedom to make their own risk-benefit assessments.”

As usual, however, the situation is more complicated than merely freedom of choice or bans by the government. Vast amounts of the U.S. food industry benefits from subsidies in the form of SNAP benefits and school lunches, among other programs. These provide a high margin of profitability for the producers.

Government is the consumer in this case, and not a very discerning one. Producers manufacture products that sell well for particular industrial purposes. These often require very long shelf lives and the ability to sustain the look and feel of food from having traveled long distances in challenging temperatures.

It makes sense that petroleum and synthetic products make the journey from factory to shelf more easily than natural dyes like fruit juices and spices. The look is entirely different when using real food dyes. I was at a Vietnamese superstore that sells none of the synthetic products because no one would ever buy them. I looked at the colors of the sweets. They are certainly more dull and less optically appealing. On the other hand, they look like food used to look.

I shop often at local markets and trade with local bakeries so I don’t see much of these fake colors in food. Farmers markets don’t use them. On the other hand, these cater to a customer who is health- conscious and pays for the real deal. Most people do not do this.

An investigation into how these synthetic dyes got in our food takes us far back in time to the very first federal food regulation measure of 1906 that centered on regulating the meat-packing industry. The cover story was that it was eliminating unhealthy and dangerous practices. In reality, and as unpacked by many historians, the dominant lobbyists in the text and implementation of the controls were the major industrial firms.

This is how “poke and sniff” became the dominant way meat was inspected in this country. It was the opposite of safe and ended up spreading disease. But it also resulted in much higher costs for the industry that only the biggest players could bear. The practical effect was to drive out small meat packing companies and bolster a growing cartel in the industry. The 1906 act was not really about stopping bad practices, it was about entrenching large businesses as the controlling force of industrial planning.

This was only the beginning of what ended up being a century-long consolidation of the food industry. It firmed up at the New Deal, which implemented a central plan for agriculture complete with production limits, mandates, subsidies, and controls. Price controls in World War II strengthened it further. The mad dash toward gigantic food-production subsidies in the early 1970s consolidated the industry ever more.

Independent farmers were the ones who suffered.

What was being created here was not a “free market” but a food cartel that discriminated hard against small farms and local food and in favor of centralized and industrial methods of production. Ask any local farmer or rancher about the struggles they face. The regulatory barriers are huge and the mandates all-consuming. They cannot simply raise food and sell it. They face a barrage of investigations and regulatory hoops.

A free market is exactly what they want. But it doesn’t exist. They will tell you that the big producers in the market have all the advantages over them wheres they would be fine a genuinely competitive market.

Food production and distribution in the United States is famously consolidated. What seems like infinite choice at the supermarket is really an illusion. Depending on the product, the dominant producers are usually one of the big four: PepsiCo, Tyson, Nestlé, and Kraft. The smaller producers are in the mix but face intractable barriers.

The problem with corporate consolidation is that it creates uniform industrial practices designed less for the consumer and more for the well-being of the company and its systems. These dyes have been fine for that purpose, and perpetuated themselves without an adequate system of feedback from the market they serve.

This is a reason not to blame the free market for unhealthy food. We don’t have a free market. We have a corporatist system in which the biggest players rely on close cooperation with the FDA and other regulatory agencies to protect and consolidate their market share. They get away with practices that otherwise would be punished in a real market with consumer-based accountability.

There is an additional problem with the existence of the FDA itself. Most Americans believe that because of its presence, anything for sale at the store has necessarily been certified as safe and fine to eat. If something says it is healthy, it surely is.

In a genuine market economy without such an overlay of constant assurance from government, we might develop more of a habit of questioning the claims of producers or seeking out better sources of information. There would surely be private and accurate sources to which we could appeal.

In electronics, for example, Underwriters Laboratory has long certified the safety of products. It is not a government institution and gets no support from government so far as I can tell. It makes money entirely from fees from producers who pay to have their products certified as safe. If the company fails in its duties, it would face a huge blowback. The system works.

The FDA, on the other hand, has long presided over a system largely captured by industrial lobbyists, shared patent revenue, revolving doors of regulators from and to industry, and conflicts of interest that are rampant throughout the whole process of food and drug approvals.

The system is deeply compromised to the point that it blesses certain practices in production and distribution that could never survive a legitimate market test. They dominate precisely because market forces are not allowed to operate to enable a correction.

For this reason, and despite my preference for freedom in all matters, I’m not unhappy about the pushes against synthetic food dyes that are now being enacted. Arguably, this should just be the beginning, a course correction. The agencies have served to ratify and protect practices that otherwise would not have survived in a genuine marketplace.

Freedom of choice is essential but so is informed choice and a truly competitive marketplace.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.