The chair of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) on Tuesday pushed back on callsfrom progressive lawmakers to cut Pentagon spending, a day ahead of the panel’s markup ofthe next defense policy bill that will include considering a $25 billion topline boost.“A lot of people who criticize how much money we spend on defense talk about otherpriorities,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said during a Brookings Institution discussion. “I don’thave an enormous amount of sympathy for that argument right now because we just spent $6trillion in the last year dealing with COVID. We’ve got proposals on the table to spend another Ithink almost $5 trillion on a variety of other different priorities.”
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