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White House Threatens to Veto Defense Bill Over Dispute About 1% of the Budget

President Obama is threatening to veto the National Defense Authorization Act because of a dispute over $38 billion in funding for the Pentagon. That represents less than 1 percent of the total Fiscal Year 2016 budget. Remarkably, the veto threat is not over the amount of defense spending, since Congress simply met the president’s budget request for defense. While the president claims to oppose the way Congress did this – by adding $38 billion to the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) emergency war-funding account in order to get around the budget caps – the reality is that the White House has said it will not accept additional defense spending without equal increases to domestic spending as well.

Is the president willing to put our national security on the line and underfund the military over a disagreement about less than 1 percent of the overall budget?

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