Freeman and Hartung: Despite a $1 trillion Pentagon budget, our veterans are being neglected

This year, for the first time, the Pentagon’s budget topped $1 trillion. We’re told this is to “support the troops.” Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. While tens of thousands of veterans are homeless and hundreds of thousands are going hungry the Pentagon is wasting billions on things like $1,500 coffee cups and $150,000 on soap dispensers.

More than half of the Defense Department’s budget goes to private companies, not to military personnel. Those Pentagon contractors spend our taxpayer dollars to help pay for things like $20 million-plus CEO salaries, more than a thousand lobbyists, and multi-billion-dollar stock buy backs that artificially inflate the value of their shares, but do nothing to actually keep Americans safe, let alone, “support the troops.”