With U.S. President Joe Biden still under fire for proposing a $753 billion national defense budget for the next fiscal year—the bulk of which would go to the Pentagon—a report published Tuesday exposes the “huge sums paid to the CEOs and other top executives of the nation’s five largest weapons contractors” in 2020.
The new Center for International Policy (CIP) issue brief—entitled Executive Excess: CEO Compensation in the Arms Industry, 2020 (pdf)—was authored by William D. Hartung and Leila Riazi, who began by acknowledging the current president’s recent proposal, which has been widely rejected by progressives.
“These enormous sums for the Pentagon are often justified as necessary to meet the needs of military personnel,” Hartung and Riazi note, “but in fact, roughly half of the Pentagon’s budget is spent on corporations like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman, as well as the hundreds of thousands of private contractors employed by the department.”
The brief points out that those top five weapons firms received over $150 billion in Pentagon contracts during Fiscal Year 2020—and “not all of these funds are well spent.”
— source commondreams.org | Jessica Corbett | May 04, 2021