The Biden administration’s proposed 2025 budget would cut the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) funding while pushing for increased spending for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
The proposal would ultimately cut more than $5.6 billion from the VA’s budget, lowering the department’s discretionary allocation by about 4.2 percent.
The Department of Defense, meanwhile, would get an increase of more than 4 percent to combat threats in Gaza, Ukraine, and the Indo-Pacific. That would allow the Pentagon to continue record spending, despite having never passed an audit.
The budget also calls on Congress to pass the Senate-approved version of the president’s supplemental security spending request. That bill would allocate more than $90 billion in security-related spending for Israel, Ukraine, and the United States’ presence in the Pacific.
The supplemental would provide $3.4 billion to spend on the nation’s Submarine Industrial Base, $14.3 billion to support Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, and $61.4 billion to support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.
The proposed budget would expand the toxic chemical fund and provide billions more to the department’s flagging effort to replace its information technology infrastructure while making a multi-percentage-point cut across the department.
