All three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation, in a series of votes Wednesday night and Thursday morning, voted against a bill to increase the U.S. Department of Defense’s annual budget by $28 billion — bucking bipartisan support for the measure.
Despite a lack of support from U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch — an independent and Democrat, respectively — in the Senate and Democratic U.S. Rep. Becca Balint in the House, the $886 billion defense budget passed both chambers with bipartisan support. In the Senate, Sanders and Welch were two of only 13 senators to object to the budget bill, with 87 voting in favor. In the House, Balint joined 117 of her colleagues in voting ‘nay,’ with 310 voting affirmatively.
Notably included in the bill was a 5.2% pay raise for military service members, and absent from its final version were two controversial Republican House-led proposals which would have impacted service members’ access to abortion and gender-affirming health care access, according to CNN.
The bill also included two of Welch’s key priorities, he noted in a statement following the Senate vote: an expansion to earlier legislation related to military service members’ exposure to toxic burn pits, and the extension of a Department of Defense pilot program incentivising contracts with employee-owned businesses.
Despite these wins, though, Welch rejected the bill. In an interview the morning after the Senate vote, he told VTDigger that the reason behind his vote was a lack of accountability for the U.S. Department of Defense’s ever-growing and never-audited annual budget. And with the department’s budget ballooning year after year, he wondered aloud “how it impacts meeting our domestic needs.”
“We need a military. The defense department does a lot of things that are absolutely essential to our wellbeing,” Welch said. “But the approach I’ve seen toward the defense budget is that it’s always addition, and never subtraction or never accountability.
“At a certain point, shouldn’t we ask the question that we ask every other department: to account for what you’re doing, so that we can see if we can do what we’re doing better and with less expense?” Welch concluded.
Neither Sanders’ nor Balint’s offices provided additional comments on the reason behind their votes Wednesday and Thursday.
