On Monday, February 12, the Trump administration unveiled a $1.5 trillion plan to upgrade and improve America’s sagging infrastructure. Although the term “infrastructure” dates from the 1930s, it was the Clinton administration that turned it into a household term denoting the sum of systems that allow a complex society to operate efficiently. Key elements in our infrastructure — roads, bridges, railways, telephone lines, fiber optic cables, and so forth — have become staples of political discussion ever since, with both parties vying to be the Party of Infrastructure.

In recent years, collapsing bridges, deteriorating streets and highways, and an aging, outage-prone power grid have all drawn attention to the decline of our once-robust infrastructure. Highways that once glistened with new asphalt are now overcrowded and underfunded, resulting in potholed interstates and crumbling overpasses. An electrical grid for which power outages were almost unknown now seems much more vulnerable to storms and heat waves. And the problems continue to multiply, as government funds once used to keep the infrastructure state-of-the art are diverted to other, less-essential uses in the interest of the ever-expanding welfare state.

Put simply, government is struggling to figure out how to afford infrastructure maintenance. In an age where government is also expected to take care of millions enjoying various welfare benefits and to spend vast sums maintaining a military used not merely for national defense but for “peacekeeping” missions all over the world that have more to do with defending foreign borders than our own, there simply isn’t enough left to spend on keeping the roads and communication systems in proper repair — let alone build more of them.

Then came the Trump budget plan, which, as is customary, Congress cordially ignored while preparing its own spending bill, the latest in a long series of seat-of-the-pants bills, ill-considered stopgaps that have propelled the national debt higher and higher as annual budgets and spending caps become ever-more-distant memories. Whereas Trump’s budget proposal contemplated a number of significant cuts in Big Government programs of dubious constitutional legitimacy, such as elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Community Development Block Grant Program, the omnibus spending proposal ultimately passed by Congress kept them all, and much more besides.

To the consternation of many of his supporters, President Trump, on March 23 after threatening a veto, signed the latest omnibus spending bill, a 2,232-page, $1.3 trillion monstrosity, even though it contained no funding for his proposed border wall and ran roughshod over most of his other budgetary priorities. That majorities in both parties have no appetite for border protection has become painfully obvious; that they also have no sense of fiscal restraint left, and are bent on spending the country into bankruptcy, should be of grave concern to any citizen interested in seeing America survive the 21st century.

Allowed Versus Disallowed Spending

Amid all the rancorous debate over border walls, infrastructure, military spending, and the many other bones of contention, one perspective has been conspicuous for its absence: What types of government spending are constitutional? The answer is surprisingly straightforward: All spending for government activities authorized by the Constitution are legitimate (regardless of whether or not they are deemed prudent or imprudent on other grounds). Democrats and leftists of all stripes, for example, love to vilify military spending, and to point out what a gargantuan piece of the budgetary pie is accounted for in such spending. Yet military spending per se is clearly constitutional, even if many of the activities of the U.S. military, including involvement in undeclared wars all over the world, are not. The 12th and 13th clauses in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution spell out Congress’ authority over military spending in the following terms:

Congress shall have the power ... [t]o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; [and] To provide and maintain a Navy.

Quite another question is: Must we maintain our military posture, with military bases all over the world, from Japan and Germany, to Qatar, Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, and many other countries? Much of America’s modern global military-industrial complex was erected by men and organizations hostile to America’s interests as defined by the Founding Fathers, George Washington perhaps most conspicuously. Rather than perceiving the American military as a national defense force, as the Founders all intended, and supporting America’s longstanding policy of non-intervention, elite postwar planners such as John Foster Dulles and George Marshall in effect committed America to being the guarantor of worldwide peace, stability, and economic prosperity in perpetuum. Postwar America is thus tasked with keeping Japan, Europe, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, and, increasingly, other far-flung regions such as East Africa and Central Asia, garrisoned and secure from whatever bugbears of the day are deemed dangers to world peace. Where once the Soviet and Chinese communist menaces were used to justify a policy of containment, so now the open-ended War on Terror is used as a rationale for keeping alive Cold War alliances such as NATO and ANZUS, and for continuing to maintain bases in East Asia and Europe that were supposedly built to contain a Soviet Union that no longer exists.

It is beyond the scope of this article to examine to what degree our military spending may be allocated to functions that have nothing to do with national defense. But it is worth pointing out that, insofar as U.S. military spending is consistently higher than that of the next eight largest militaries combined, including such formidable adversaries as Russia and China, there is little doubt that the allegedly dire predicament of the U.S. military and its readiness to defeat potential enemies are greatly exaggerated for political reasons whenever it comes time to divvy up the latest budgetary pie. And it’s worth noting that few Americans nowadays are clamoring for more money to be spent on unwinnable wars and interventionism — President Trump’s “America first” rhetoric was a large part of the reason he got elected — making this an area where government spending can be cut without the sort of political resistance to be encountered in other budgetary concerns, such as trimming welfare-state spending.

War and a Wall

The latest $1.3 trillion spending package, which President Trump reluctantly signed into law, authorizes military spending to rise by another $80 billion over previous levels, and includes $144 billion on military hardware, much of which will end up being deployed to protect the Iraqi and Afghan homelands, among others, rather than our own. This in and of itself is objectionable, but the bill further refuses to fund any portion of President Trump’s border wall, a federal project clearly defensible not only on grounds of constitutionality but also prudence. Moreover, the bill sets a limit on the number of illegal immigrants ICE can have in detention by the end of September — 40,354. Unless repealed, this provision will kneecap Immigration and Customs Enforcement in its newly invigorated drive to round up illegals and deport them — exactly as Democrats intend it to do.

Photo: Gordan1/ iStock / Getty Images Plus

This article appears in the May 21, 2018, issue of The New American.