President Donald Trump is on target to dramatically rebuild the nation's military — and one way to pay for it is by slashing the overstuffed budget of the "fat, dumb, and happy" State Department, Jed Babbin, former deputy undersecretary of defense under George H.W. Bush, told Newsmax TV.
"President Trump is absolutely right, we need to rebuild the military," Babbin told host Steve Malzberg on Tuesday's "America Talks Live." "It's been left pretty much in shambles since [President Barack] Obama took office.
"Nothing has been done to increase the readiness of our forces. So, a lot needs to be done."
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Babbin, now a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, said the $54 billion figure being mentioned to supplement the current defense budget would be a boon to some severely neglected areas of the military.
"I mean, heck, the Marine Corps has about 70 percent of its F-18s that can't even fly. So, there's a lot of things that need to be done urgently with that $54 billion, and it can be done," Babbin told Malzberg, adding a trim of the State Department can help pay some of those billions.
"The State Department has been fat, dumb, and happy for, I don't know, 50 years. There's an awful lot that can be cut there . . . There's a lot of fat in the whole budget of the State Department and the bureaucracy there," Babbin said.
"You can find a lot of places that we can cut foreign aid. There's a lot of countries that frankly don't like us very much, and we're paying them to do it. That does not make a lot of sense to me. So, you can find tens of billions of dollars there to cut really without sweating very hard."
Trump will address a joint session of Congress to unveil more of his administration's agenda, including a 2018 fiscal-year budget, Tuesday night.
Babbin is author of "The BDS War Against Israel: The Orwellian Campaign to Destroy Israel Through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement" written with Herbert London and published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
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