The Military Family Nutrition Access Act was introduced in the Senate this year with the aim of making more military families eligible for food stamps, following a recommendation from the United States Army last year that struggling service members should apply for the program.
Historically, Senate members and elected officials have attempted to remove military personnel from reliance on food stamps, focusing on increasing their salaries instead.
In 2000, measures like the “Remove Service Members from Food Stamps Act” were introduced to boost military pay, with both Bush and Gore promising to end the need for food stamps altogether.
Consequently, the number of servicemen and women needing assistance dropped significantly into the low thousands but has now risen back up to over 20,000.
Rather than attempting to completely eliminate the need for food stamps among military families, lawmakers are instead focusing on making the application process more accessible for those who require support.
This shift in focus is symptomatic of a broader trend within the US political landscape that has seen politicians prioritize social justice issues over traditional defense spending.
For instance, the Biden administration recently requested $114 million to fund the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which are intended to “ensure our entire workforce lives by fundamental values that bolster unit cohesion.
This euphemistic language is often used as a veil for leftist political indoctrination within the military.
The term ‘DEI’ has become synonymous with replacing merit and equality with government intervention or ‘equity’, often through affirmative action policies, measures that penalize people based on their race, and spreading the idea that differences in outcomes are due to ‘systemic racism’ and ‘whiteness’ that need to be eradicated.
The DoD plans to spend millions of dollars on these initiatives, with a particular focus on indoctrinating students within military families via its education arm, DoDEA.
The DEI agenda is not just about social justice; it also involves redistributing money from working-class taxpayers and military families to highly paid consultants and DEI personnel.
For example, Kelisa Wing, the head of DoDEA’s DEI unit, has a $164,000 salary despite having ranted about “white folx” with the “CAUdacity to say that black people can be [racist] too.” Meanwhile, soldiers are struggling to put food on the table for their families while these individuals live in mansions.
The right number for the DoD’s DEI budget should be zero, and any past funds allocated to this ideological effort to politicize the military and poison its culture should be clawed back.
The Pentagon needs to shed all extraneous equity and environmental responsibilities and focus on national security.
Only then will there be enough left over in the government’s budget to truly take care of our troops and ensure they have access to essential resources like food assistance programs.