We are writing on the behalf of the Hawaii Advocacy Team of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which is part of a national lobbying group of the American Friends Service Committee, better known as the Quakers. Some members of the local team are Quakers; many are not. But we all believe in making our world a more peaceful place and having our government pursue policies that help our country and world achieve that goal.
We are not anti-defense or anti-military, but we have deep concerns about how much money our government is spending on the military as compared to what it is spending on efforts to promote peace around the world.
Last year the national FCNL lobbying effort concentrated on better funding for peace efforts that involved a complex crises fund, atrocities prevention programs and reconciliation cfforts, all of which are designed to either stop wars or conflicts before they start or lessen their impact.
These programs are ongoing, but continued funding at adequate levels was in doubt. We are happy and gratified that the funding for these programs was maintained. Studies show that for every dollar spent on peace efforts, $16 is saved in the costs of war (Institute for Economics and Peace: “Measuring Peacebuilding Cost-Effectiveness,” 2017). So not only are there moral basis for peace spending, there are also sound economic ones.
This fiscal year, FCNL is supporting a new piece of national legislation, the Streamline Pentagon Budgeting Act (SPBA) which, if passed, would eliminate a program called the Unfunded Priorities List (UPL).
The UPL currently requires all branches of our Armed Services to submit requests that go beyond what is submitted in the defense budget by the president on behalf of the Department of Defense. Not only does the proposed SPBA have bipartisan support in Congress, the Department of Defense as well as the secretary of defense have expressed the desire to have the UPL eliminated.
We as Quakers and supporters of FCNL strongly believe that the UPL is undemocratic, as items included in it bypass the normal budgetary process. That normal process provides more transparency as well as more direct congressional oversight.
The proposed defense budget for fiscal year 2025 already stands at $849.8 billion. This amount does not include the ongoing nuclear weapons research by the Department of Energy, the nearly $4 billion in military aid we send to Israel annually, or the billions of dollars we are spending on the war in Ukraine. UPL requests for this year would add another $12 billion.
One of the primary reasons behind why UPL funding still has support of many members of Congress is that individual states continue to benefit economically from defense spending.
Just think of Hawaii, which received $8.8 billion in military and other defense-related spending in fiscal year 2022.
Also, we continue to be influenced by the growing power of our military-industrial complex, which likely even exceeds what Dwight Eisenhower warned us against over 70 years ago.
The fact is that the U.S. supplies, and corporations benefit from the sale of, massive amounts of weapons and other military-related equipment and services that these corporations provide to foreign governments.
The fact is that we are responsible for about 40% of the world’s arm sales, and our corporations are annually making billions of dollars in profits from this trade.
We, the Hawaii Advocacy Team of the FCNL, strongly urge Hawaii’s congressional delegation to support the elimination of the Unfunded Priorities List and provide more support for FCNL’s “Underfunded Priorities List,” which includes vital social programs such as health care, adequate housing and mental health services.
John Murphy is a retired attorney on Maui; Nina Allan is a Ph.D. candidate in cellular and molecular biology at University of Hawaii; Michael Sukhov, Ph.D., is a social science researcher at UH-West Oahu; they are FCNL Hawaii advocacy team members.
