Comparing votes with campaign contributions
Speaking Security Newsletter | Note n°184 | 9 December 2022
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Situation
The House passed the FY2023 NDAA yesterday afternoon, which authorizes $858.4 billion in military spending. While nothing’s official until funds are actually appropriated for the Pentagon (and not just authorized), the NDAA’s framework will likely be filled in with the commensurate $858 billion through a forthcoming omnibus or other type of spending bill. Democrat and Republican leaders have already agreed on that aspect of the FY23 federal budget; the hangup in negotiations is over $23 billion in non-military spending.
Here is the roll call of yesterday’s vote:
Votes v. campaign cash
Legislation is typically passed along party lines. Party affiliation can’t explain this one, though: both the Yes and No voting blocs on the FY23 NDAA had about the same number of Democrat members in them as Republicans.
What differences are there between each bipartisan bloc? One that jumps out to me is the disparity in political contributions accepted from the arms industry during the 2022 election cycle. On average, House members who voted for the $858 billion FY23 NDAA—an $80 billion increase over the amount authorized by the FY22 version—received 6.9 times more money from military contractors than those who voted against it.
That’s for the full House. House Democrats who voted Yes on the bill took an average of 8.7 times the arms industry cash of Democrats who cast No votes. House Republicans who voted Yes took 5.5 times more on average than Republicans who voted No.
Methodology
Pretty straightforward. I compared the House roll call votes on the FY23 NDAA with how much each member received from the arms industry during the 2022 election cycle, using data from OpenSecrets. When determining the average amount received from military contractors, I excluded a few members who voted due to missing data, and Reps. Kinzinger and Zeldin, who didn’t cast votes on the bill. All the data I used is publicly available in case anyone’s keen to run their own study. I wouldn’t recommend it, though—this analysis took forever (please consider supporting my work, here).
What I do recommend is reading this article by Taylor Giorno and Filip Timotija from OpenSecrets. It provides a terrific rundown of the arms industry’s political contributions and lobbying expenditures and analyzes the context in which it’s all taking place.
-Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)
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