The U.S. government continues to shut down, and 800,000 government employees begin to "rebel". For the first time in modern American history, the U.S. military may not be paid! Trump was forced to cut out his flesh to mend his sores, but he was ready to misappropriate R&D funds. What does this mean?
The U.S. government has been shut down for more than 13 days, about 750,000 federal employees have been forced to take leave, and hundreds of thousands more are working without pay. A big and pressing problem is that the U.S. military's wages will soon not be paid. On the 15th of this month, the day when roughly 1.3 million U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of reserves and National Guards were paid, the failure to pay would undoubtedly severely weaken U.S. combat capabilities and even have more serious security consequences.But in the short term, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are still deadlocked around the spending issue, and the shutdown of the US government will not end so soon. There are still two days before the U.S. military can't pay its salary. In order to avoid this unprecedented situation in modern American history, U.S. President Trump has thought of a special way.
On the 11th, Trump posted on social media that he had instructed “war secretary” Hergezes to “use all available funds” to ensure that the U.S. military could receive salaries on October 15. However, Pentagon officials revealed that the Trump administration plans to misappropriate research and development and testing funds allocated to the US military. This money is about US$8 billion and will be used to pay military salaries.Through this move, the Trump administration has temporarily solved the problem of salary payment of the US military, but obviously, this is a typical strategy of overdrafting the future, which will bring serious side effects.
First, the misuse of research and development and testing funds will lead to an immediate halt of a number of U.S. military technology projects, which will not only hit U.S. defense suppliers heavily, but may also cause major delays to the U.S. military's military programs, leaving the progress of some key projects behind, which will have far-reaching consequences and may threaten the U.S. military's strategic deterrence and military advantage.
Secondly, the Trump administration has set a dangerous precedent in doing so. Since this time it can misappropriate the research and development expenses of the US military to pay wages, it seems that a similar model of robbing Peter to pay Paul in the future is acceptable, which will fundamentally destroy the current financial system of the United States and add great uncertainty to the future. It is precisely because of the danger of doing so that during the shutdown of the U.S. government in the past, special bills were often passed to pay salaries, instead of directly misappropriating them like Trump.
But backwards, Trump’s dangerous precedent is not just the misuse of R&D spending, but a more dangerous trick is “cutting off” the U.S. government. On the 10th, the Trump administration began to implement large-scale, permanent job cuts on federal employees, this is the first time in the modern history of the United States. During the previous US government shutdown, employees were asked for temporary leave, and Trump directly let a large number of American "public servants" permanently leave, which fundamentally damaged the function of the United States government.As for the reason Trump did this, not mainly to save money, but to put pressure on the Democrats and tell the American society, all because the Democrats did not cooperate, there were such serious consequences.
From an objective point of view, we have to say that Trump purely puts his personal political interests above the country, and in order to fight the political struggle with the Democrats, he does not care to get the United States down, but this is exactly the perfect picture of his personal style. U.S. government employees are also not "hand-in-hand" and two U.S. unions representing 800,000 government employees have put forward a motion to try to use legal means to block Trump's cuts, in which a federal judge in San Francisco has ordered the Trump administration to provide information about the cuts.But then, no one knows what the Trump administration will do, the Democratic and Republican two-party struggle has intensified, coupled with such an unreliable president, the United States can do a good job.