(MintPress) – The House passed the 2013 defense budget Friday permitting $643 billion in defense spending for a number of things, including nuclear weapons and the war in Afghanistan, even though the White House has threatened to veto the bill.
The National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the spending, exceeds what Congress and President Barack Obama had allocated for defense and would take money from low-income programs, health care and the federal workforce.
The bill passed 299 to 120, with more than 30 changes to the original budget.
However, the proposition increases spending of the Budget Control Act, passed last summer by Congress, by $8 billion in exchange for raising the national debt limit.
While defense spending is set to increase, more than $80 billion in federal retirement benefits, almost $50 billion from Medicaid programs and more than $36 billion from food programs directed at the United States’ poor will be cut.
“We increase the spending for defense due to the priorities that we feel are most important and the constitutional requirement we have to provide for the common defense,” Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) said. “But we will cut in other areas of the budget so that we comply fully with the deficit reduction act.”
The bill includes construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast and restrictions to reduce U.S. nuclear resources.
“The United States should not wander down the road toward nuclear disarmament because President Obama has pinned his hopes on a belief that other nations will blindly follow our lead,” said Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) sponsor of one of the amendments.
Additionally, the bill reiterates that indefinite detention without trial of suspected terrorists is needed for national security.
However, Obama has said that he has serious hesitations about the methods of indefinitely detaining, interrogating and prosecuting suspected terrorists.
“My administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens,” Obama said. “Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation.”