Your taxes, their bombs

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The Lever, 7/22/25

Funding the forever wars. Congressional Republicans have, as usual, turned must-pass legislation that will fund annual military policy into a defense industry bonanza. The latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act that advanced in the House last week authorizes $848 billion in spending for the U.S. military, much of which will be funneled (with additional revenue from Trump’s megabill) straight to private defense contractors. Other beneficiaries also include the business and foreign interests represented by the pro-Israel lobbying powerhouse AIPAC, which issued a wishlist of legislative items earlier this year, nearly all of which are now included in the defense bill.

The Israel lobby cashes in. AIPAC spent more than $100 million on the 2024 federal elections, setting a campaign spending record. Nearly two-thirds of Congress have accepted AIPAC money, ensuring a united bipartisan front in support of Israel even as the country wages what many experts have definitively concluded is a genocide in Gaza. Now, AIPAC-funded lawmakers appear to be happily rubber-stamping the organization’s defense requests, which will funnel more money to the Israel Defense Forces.

Investing in genocide tech. Lawmakers, with AIPAC’s backing, introduced the “United States-Israel Defense Partnership Act of 2025,” legislation in February to authorize hundreds of millions in spending on various partnerships between the Israeli and U.S. militaries. That includes $150 million for a new joint technology program between the U.S. and Israel to counter drone weapons; it also entails extending the so-called “Future of Warfare” program for another five years, at $50 million annually, to develop “emerging technologies” like artificial intelligence. 

  • Last year, an investigation by the Israeli magazine +972 revealed that the Israeli military was using AI to generate bombing targets, contributing to the immense civilian death toll of the Gaza war.

Money talks. Most of the key defense provisions that AIPAC supported in a policy brief this year and lobbied for throughout the spring are now included in both the House and Senate draft versions of the new defense bill, having survived committee markups. AIPAC has spent nearly $1 million lobbying on the bill, among other legislative priorities, in the first quarter of 2025. 

  • The lead sponsors of the U.S.-Israel Defense Partnership Act have received millions from AIPAC and its affiliated network of pro-Israel donors: Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), has accepted more than $1.5 million from AIPAC and its network of donors over his congressional career, while Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), counts AIPAC as his top campaign donor.

Reporting contributed by Katya Schwenk and Luke Goldstein.

4 thoughts on “Your taxes, their bombs”

  1. once you say taxes pay for bombs,your next breath will be to accept that social investments are unaffordable in sovereign economies-the myths run rampant

  2. AIPAC gets good value for its money. It looks like they have paid Josh Gottheimer about $14,400 a month. That seems a good retainer for someone with a law degree.

  3. “Last year, an investigation by the Israeli magazine +972 revealed that the Israeli military was using AI to generate bombing targets, contributing to the immense civilian death toll of the Gaza war.”

    Proof positive that AI is all about fraud, in Silicon Valley it is a bubble fraud, and in Israel it is a fraud to take the blame for murder off of “humans” and onto a software that is no more effective than rolling dice, as Hamas has evidenced. The bubble will pop, but I suspect the genocide will keep going, expanding to Syria, and finally to the USA to feed the Soylent Green Factories.

  4. “National Defense Authorization Act that advanced in the House last week authorizes $848 billion in spending for the U.S. military”
    We should all remember that the Pentagon has failed its 7th audit in a row – so these numbers are mostly meaningless.

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