President Joe Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Monday, allocating $768 billion to the Department of Defense for the 2022 fiscal year. The legislation sailed through both houses of Congress as a number of deficit hawk legislators dropped any pretense about spending concerns and voted for the bill.
That includes Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who of all the Democratic senators has made the biggest stink about the price tag for the president’s Build Back Better agenda. Manchin helped whittle down the initial sticker price of $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion to be spent over 10 years. Over a decade, the cost of the bill on average per year would have been nearly four and a half times less than the Pentagon’s budget for 2022.
