As with other establishment Democrats, Representative Adam Smith (D, WA-09) supported the Trump impeachment inquiry on the grounds of corruption. In a statement, this ‘New Democrat’ said: “The American people deserve to know how the President leveraged congressionally authorized taxpayer dollars for his own personal interest over national security”.

“[O]ver national security” is a crucial qualifier: Smith also uses public funds for personal gain, in his capacity as a ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee — the congressional committee responsible for authorizing taxpayer dollars to the defense industry. As of February 3, Smith had already raked in $166,250 in campaign contributions from the defense industry [1] for his 2020 re-election bid. To fuel his 2018 reelection campaign, Smith took in a whopping $256,250 from the defense industry. At root, these campaign contributions are largely taxpayer funds.

Here’s how defense spending winds up back in Smith’s own campaign warchest. In his first defense budget request, Trump asked for $639.1 billion; $33 billion more than the amount spent in the previous year. Congress ended up giving him a $64.6 billion increase. Of the $670.6 billion ultimately enacted for Fiscal Year 2018, 56 percent — $372.5 billion — was directed to the private sector,[2] up $40.5 billion from the year before. Effectively, Democratic Party leadership agreed to tens of billions in additional corporate welfare to defense contractors, then proceeded to sponsor legislation designed to deter additional funding for Medicare or Social Security in the name of ‘fiscal responsibility’.

As the Smith campaign warchest demonstrates, much of ‘national security’ funding has an afterlife propping up the campaigns of members of Congress who are friendly to the industry. So the ranking Democrats’ impeachment inquiry was never about corruption per se, but rather about which forms of corruption ‘national security’ permits. No meaning would be lost by substituting Smith’s name for “the President” in his statement above. The difference comes down to subtlety: Trump’s corruption was obvious; Smith’s is discreet. More can be learned from examining Smith’s kleptocratic actions.

Legalized Corruption

Adam Smith / Image courtesy U.S. House of Representatives.

Adam Smith has been in Congress since 1996. Smith voted for the invasion of Iraq, was co-sponsor of a bill that allowed the US government to disseminate propaganda domestically (reversing the Smith-Munda Act of 1948), and voted against an amendment that would have curtailed the NSA’s practice of warrantless mass collection of the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of any crime.

Naturally, Democratic Party leadership made him Chair of the House Armed Services Committee in January 2019. Since then, Smith has repeatedly stated that Trump poses a threat to ‘national security’ while using his position to grant Trump far-reaching executive powers to wage war, and authorizing the record-setting military budgets Trump has demanded.

This is not merely hypocrisy — like Trump, Smith has a vested interest in staying in power and knows that keeping military spending at record levels helps him achieve that. Unlike Trump, however, Smith knows that Trump’s garish tactics are unpopular. Smith choses a more subtle form of corruption: Ensuring that weapons corporations can launder their parochial interests through foreign policy ‘expertise’.

Corporate elites playing dress-up

Alongside other ranking members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Smith was responsible for appointing ‘experts’ to the National Defense Strategy Commission to author a report, “Providing for the Common Defense” (2018). For its authors, anything short of a $750 billion defense budget is tantamount to “a crisis of national security.” If politics is ‘the fight over who gets what’ this recommendation is highly political. Unfortunately, it was frequently described in the media as “bipartisan” — suggesting that some ‘solution’ had been reached as a result of the authors’ shared pursuit of a universal good — effectively characterizing the fear-mongering policy proposal as non-political or ‘above politics’.

As usual, though, the ‘bipartisan’ modifier provides rhetorical cover for policies that brutalize the working class. When the class dimension falls out, the conflicts of interest — even if they’re present on the cover of a report — are left unmentioned. For example, report Co-Chair Gary Roughead is on the board of directors for Northrop Grumman, a weapons corporation that is routinely among the top five recipients of public funds diverted from the Department of Defense. By the time of the report’s release, Roughead had received more than $1.6 million in compensation from the corporation (while holding ‘expert’ positions at several establishment think tanks). The report itself was featured by the United States Institute of Peace, an establishment think tank.[3]

Who appointed this corporate representative to serve as an ‘expert’? Adam Smith.

But why Northrop Grumman specifically? After all, plenty of former military officials end up joining the boards of a range of weapons manufacturers. What is it about Northrop Grumman in particular that led Smith to use his seniority within the House Armed Services Committee to choose Roughead?

Oh.[4]

Northrop Grumman was the fifth-highest recipient of federal contracts in Fiscal Year 2018. According to its 2018 annual report, the company had earned over $30 billion in ‘sales’, with more than 80 percent coming from US taxpayers.

Conclusion

Through their relentless focus on Trump’s corruption, liberal elites situate themselves as responsible stewards of US foreign policy, and regard ‘national security’ as an inviolable master value. They aren’t — and it isn’t. Adam Smith’s voting record demonstrates the former, while his corporate finance scheme shows that corruption is part-and-parcel of US ‘national security’ policies. A new security narrative is needed that actually aligns political priorities — and therefore public resources — to the most real and urgent threats facing the working class (and not the elites).

WHILE YOU'RE HERE: Security Policy Reform Institute was established in 2018 as an independent, grassroots initiative to build a values-based left foreign policy. Critical analysis takes time. So does building a bottom-up movement to serve the working class. If you value our work, please consider supporting us on Patreon. And thank you.

[1] This total is well over double the amount of the second-highest contributing sector.

[2] By comparison, obligated contracts by the Department of Energy totaled $30.1 billion; Department of Health and Human Services, $24.0 billion; Department of State, $9.9 billion; and the Department of Agriculture and Department of Transportation each obligated $6.7 billion in contracts.

[3] The think tank received $14 million from the federal government and the remaining $172 million from the private sector (including Chevron Corporation, with a $10 million donation, and Lockheed Martin with a $1 million contribution) to build its 120,000 square foot headquarters in Washington, DC. For Philip Kennicott, its design befits its sponsors: “The institute’s design marks yet another low point in [the architect’s] long descent into repetitive corporate architecture.”

[4] Data provided by Open Secrets. Figures refer to the 2018 congressional fundraising cycle.