President Barack Obama’s plan to cut $400 billion in security spending by 2023 is an admirable but modest first step toward getting our nation’s fiscal house in order. After 13 straight years of real growth in the baseline defense budget—the longest period of sustained real growth in U.S. history—our nation now spends more on defense than it has at any point since the end of World War II, including during the peak of the Cold War.
Please join the Center for American Progress Action Fund for a keynote address by Representative Barney Frank (D-MA), ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, on the nation’s defense-spending priorities. Frank has been an outspoken proponent of sensible defense-spending reductions and last year convened the Sustainable Defense Task Force, an expert working group that included CAPAF Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb, and that proposed $960 billion in defense-spending reductions between 2011 and 2020.