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This substack post is based on a spreadsheet which I’ve made available here for you to download.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Summary of Expenses
HR 2471
HR 7691
HR 6833
Conclusion
1. Introduction
At the start of this conflict there are many who thought that this engagement would end quickly. Either because Russia steamrolled Ukraine, or if Russia failed to do so quickly that Ukraine instead would beat them back due to the assistance from western nations. Instead this conflict is becoming a stalemate to the detriment of everybody and the benefit of western military contractors and the military industrial complex.
The US will spend more on Ukraine this year than we’ve spent on any conflict since the Vietnam war, but it’s quite possible that as this conflict continues next year that we very well will eclipse Vietnam spending.
As you can see when the Vietnam conflict initially began we were spending ~$54 billion annually in 2022 dollars, but this eventually ramped up to almost $100 billion. We haven’t reached these levels in expenditure on Ukraine this year yet, but I would be surprised if we don’t eclipse this significantly by next year.
Congress has passed Several Appropriations bills this year authorizing spending on Ukraine and many people probably want an easy way to see the following
Whats in all of the bills
How much it totals to
Which departments are getting paid
What line items were authorized in the bill
Well I pored over all three bills approved by the US legislature until my eyes bled (you’ll see) and created a spreadsheet going through all of the line items that are directly appropriated for Ukraine spending. If you are fairly familiar with Microsoft Excel and can browse a pivot table without much trouble, the spreadsheet is available for download here. Please note this link only gives you the ability to view the spreadsheet, which does not allow you to manipulate the pivot table, so you need to make your own copy that you can edit if you want to use the pivot table.
If you do not make your own copy, you won’t be able to use the pivot table.
For those of you unfamiliar with Pivot tables and Microsoft Excel, I’ll provide a run down of the information with screenshots in the sections below.
Please be aware as well that just because these three bills were signed this year does not mean the money was spent this year. Many of these line items are for 2023, 2024, and appropriations even going as far as 2025. I’m unsure of what percentage of this money was spent just yet. In fact, nobody knows.
The last thing that you should do is maintain an awareness of how absurd all of these figures are. I’m not going to harp on it for too much in the meat of this post, but the US government typically pays 5-6x more for things than well run-governments pay. The subways are a great example.
$17 billion vs a little over $1 billion and you can see the differences. To be fair, the NYC subway is almost 700 miles of lines, while the Seoul subway is ~200 miles of lines. On a per mile basis, The city of Seoul is paying $5 million per mile of subway line to keep the system running. While the city of New York is paying $24.5 million per mile of subway line to keep the system running. This is peak US government at work. Paying 5x as much for 5x less. Keep this in mind when you think about US government outspending many other countries on our military. Just because we are spending more does not mean that we are getting more for our dollars. The west is spending more in Ukraine than Russia spends on their entire military. And we’re outspending them likely by 2x when including European spending on top of US spending. But are we getting 2x as much value as the entire Russian military?
2. Summary of Expenses
Only three bills have passed congress, the senate, and been signed into law by Joe Biden; authorizing spending to support Ukraine as a response to Russia’s invasion in 2022.
HR 2471 - signed into law 3/15/2022
It’s nearly 3,000 pages long and was required to avoid a government shutdown in March. It provided emergency funding to keep the US government running until 9/30/2022
Includes such hits as $450,000,000 to buy houses for people with AIDS. We all know Elton John fucks, but man, he needs to slow down.
HR 7691 - became law on 5/21/2022.
Oddly enough this bill includes a death gratuity to the wife of Congressional Representative Don Young. The death gratuities are normal but this bill is specifically for Ukraine so it’s odd they snuck it in here instead of a regular spending bill.
HR 6833 - became law on 9/30/2022.
This bill was signed at the last minute to avoid a government shutdown on 9/30 and offers funding to 12/16/2022 at which point a new bill will have to be signed to keep the government funded.
The bill includes an additional $2,500,000,000 for FEMA’s account to assist in disaster relief for this summers Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak fire in New Mexico. This is notable, because $133m was already directed towards relief efforts in the summer. I’m unsure of what this additional $2.5B is for or if it will even make it to New Mexico. FEMA is basically a black hole when it comes to funding. Money goes in and maybe only 10% comes out on the other side. The rest is wasted.
We’ll just be looking at these three bills, and despite how much useless trash and pork is in the bill, we’re going to ignore all of that now and only focus on the line items that are directly attributable to Ukraine relief efforts (this still includes the death gratuity for Don Young’s wife because that bill was exclusively for Ukraine).
So far this year we have authorized $84.86 billion in relief for Ukraine. For reference, Russia spends ~$65 billion on their entire military. They are probably only spending 1/3rd of our expenditure on Ukraine if even that. How much are other western nations spending on Ukraine? At what multiple is the west outspending Russia in Ukraine? 2x, 3x, 4x? I don’t know.
Since this is a war, I presume the first questions you’d have would be “so how much of this money is being spent on direct procurement of arms and weapons?” A reasonable question. You probably hear talk about helicopters, missile launchers, rifles, Humvees, Night Vision Goggles etc. and would presume that would make up the bulk of the expenses. Wrong.
Only $2.3 billion of this spending was for weapons, ammo, missiles, vehicles, aircraft, or other procurement for direct military support (lethal aid). This is not even 3% of the spending. The big problem with US government spending in general is how inefficient it is in general. Eunuchs, Bureaucrats, and Administrators gatekeeping every single step, and taking their cut of the pie. This isn’t to say the other 97% of this spending is bloat. Some military spending isn’t going towards military equipment but towards research, testing, development, Operations, Maintenance and salaries. We did provide funding to increase recruitment and to offer fairly large signing bonuses and re-enlistment bonuses in order to meet our recruitment goals (we fell significantly short of those goals). Since we missed those goals by a wide margin, you can presume that we didn’t spend the full amounts earmarked for military personnel, even with the massive signing bonuses we were offering this year.
When taking into consideration all of these other military functions, we get $33.66 billion which is roughly 40% of the total spending. This is still exorbitant and probably could be trimmed significantly, but doesn’t look nearly as bad.
There are other items like refugee assistance, that could be considered vital and $100,000,000 that was spent on the FAS’s Food for Peace program.
You may recall over the summer I mentioned a $500m loan being provided to Egypt to secure grain. This loan was likely to keep Egypt from straying too closely to the BRICS sphere and potentially risking the Suez Canal falling out of western influence. Unfortunately it didn’t really work and after grain shipments stalled in Ukraine Egypt ended up buying grain from Russia anyway, and then Russia struck Ukraine’s main export port for grain with missiles and destroyed it, which further exacerbated global food shortages and will make the middle east and Africa more dependent on Russia for grain.
This $100m earmarked for Food for Peace was to support shipments of food to Ukraine to support people who had been either displaced by the fighting or had their food sources/supply chains disrupted by the fighting. Unfortunately Congress requires at least half of these shipments to be done on US flagged vessels and only 4 US flagged vessels were available to do this work. The only problem is that they aren’t available until next year, so despite the money being earmarked in March 2022, it likely won’t start food deliveries until 2023 or later. But as usual, some Eunuch is collecting a paycheck to not deliver the food, which is a fairly decent metaphor for the US government as a whole.
$2.65 billion for refugee and migrant assistance.
$4.75 billion in direct financial support to the Government of Ukraine and Foreign Military Financing, which I have to assume also means Ukraine but it’s quite possible that this funding also went to Poland and other nearby NATO allies, but I wouldn’t know for sure. Again, nobody knows.
$84.86 billion in authorized spending
What do we have to show for it?
Talks of nuclear escalation.
What appears to be a deadlock as Russia ramps up troop deployment
So not much. Not quite a decisive victory. Not a loss either. Just a long drawn out conflict, which is likely ideal to Defense contractors and the multi-national corporations that make the missiles, bombs, planes, vehicles, and armaments. It’s even possible that the nuclear genie gets let out of the bottle if Russia feels that they are being backed too far into a corner. With the destruction of the NordStream pipelines, Russia has lost all bargaining chips and influence it could leverage over Europe’s only relevant power, Germany. We scuttled the original peace deal in April that would have ended the conflict fairly quickly. And now Zelensky is completely unwilling to negotiate at all (I understand why he would feel that way).
So we ask, does Russia have any means of escape or withdrawing from this conflict? The answer appears to be no. The only thing they can do is really entrench themselves, build diplomatic negotiations with all of the 2nd and 3rd world countries that are undecided on this conflict and consider total war with the west. That includes nukes. Is this good or bad? I can’t say for sure, sometimes life calls you to do bad things and you have no choice but to live your dharma or die. That is just the nature of existence. Maybe conflict is inevitable. But this is what our money has bought us so far. I would say that is not money well spent, not at all.
Lets take a closer look at each bill now.
3. HR 2471
This was a $1.5 trillion spending package. NPR and other news outlets claim that $13.6b of this package was earmarked for Ukraine, I’m not sure where these news outlets are getting that number from, because when I went line by line I found $17.89 billion of line items directly attributed to support for Ukraine as a result of the Russian invasion.
I suspect they are not including the Bilateral Economic Assistance as it’s to a branch that typically spends money on Europe, Eurasia, and Asia. But these particular line items were all outlined as a response to Russia’s invasion and would only end if Russia retreated/ended hostilities, so it felt fairly obvious to me that they should be included since the language specifically identifies Ukraine.
The largest line items were $5.86b in Department of Defense spending for Operations and Maintenance across the 4 branches of armed forces (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force). Followed by $4.5b in economic assistance likely for rebuilding and resettlement initiatives. Then $4b for the Office of the Inspector General. The OIG is an office focused on government oversight (lol). It’s a little ironic to me that almost 25% of the Ukraine spending was spent on oversight. You’d think the OIG would be targeting themselves for budget cuts as that is a huge chunk of budget spent looking for inefficiencies and fraud. But again, this is how the government operates.
4. HR 7691
This bill was exclusively for Ukraine spending and was not attached to any other bills
This was a much larger amount and was likely pushed forward when the West began to realize over the Summer that this would not be a quick engagement. You’ll notice that nearly $18b was earmarked for Operations and Maintenance so our armed forces were funded to become much more active after this bill passed in May. Whether they did or did not become more active as a result of this bill is completely unknown.
Even ignoring the conspiracy theory fodder, it’s quite likely that some of this military spending on more active operations is paying off. The other big line item was a revision to the foreign aid assistance act for $13.8b. My eyes were glazing over so I didn’t care to go look at that act and see exactly what it was for. You can do so if you want to as all of the information for you to do internet sleuthing is linked on this page.
An Economic Support Fund and Disaster Assistance were two other large line items in the bill. Again, I don’t know what these are for and if you are curious you should look further into them to see. As with all government spending you can expect at most 20% of the funding to make it to its intended target with the vast majority lost in waste, corruption, redundancy, incompetence, and just pure bureaucratic busy work. This money is all earmarked, but I would be surprised to hear that a single cent has made it to Ukraine in the 5 months since this bill was signed. The government just doesn’t operate like that.
Another $4 billion was appropriated by the president to provide as direct aid in Foreign Military Funding. I presume this is also primarily going towards Ukraine, with some amount to Poland and maybe some of the Baltic countries. This might be how we pay for certain operations that occur within Russia and may be why so many Russian Oligarchs have been falling out of windows lately. Some think these are internal hits performed by Putin, but I don’t really think that’s the case.
Typically when you want to hurt someone you think about what would hurt you, and you do that to the other person. In this manner, those with the greatest empathy are often the ones capable of the greatest cruelty, while those with little empathy may be more inclined to harm people but less effective at it. In the US, oligarchs and wealthy donors essentially run our government. If you wanted to put our government in disarray, you would aim for the head of Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. Just make your way down the top donor list for each political party and it’s quite likely you’d see a swift response from our legislature authorizing a war to stop whoever was doing this. This isn’t really the case in Russia. The oligarchs don’t hold much power over Putin (How would they? He is ex-KGB, the CEO of Breakfast Cereal isn’t likely to imitate nor impress Putin), so he has no real need to kill them, especially not in this manner where it looks like questionable suicides. That is an American MO (Modus Operandi), and these are American style targets. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if these are American Operations and we are simply paying the Ukrainian armed forces to carry them out.
5. HR 6833
This is the most recent bill and was an add on to the recent bill to fund the US government for another 2 and a half months and avoid a government shutdown.
This bill authorizes another $12.44 billion in funding for Ukraine. The Space Force is finally getting some love with funding for $1.7 million of operations and maintenance, no idea what’s going on there, maybe we’re sending a satellite to attack another satellite (yes, this happens).
Our largest expense on this bill was also for Operations and Maintenance, no real surprise there. The Economic Support Fund was our second largest expense. We are still adding additional funding for military personnel but I am still not expecting us to meet our recruitment goals. If the conflict escalates and there is a need to fill boots, a draft would likely be required. But thats if such conflict was a conventional warfare. The one lesson to learn from history is that each war does not follow the conventions of the last one. It’s quite possible that needs for manpower in a conflict with Russia would be lower than for the GWOT (yes, I’m serious). Invasions require a significant amount of boots on the ground. But Defending against an invasion could be done with just US air force and navy support of ground troops from UN/European countries. So we could probably get away with low levels of recruitment without a draft. More focus on cyber warfare, drones, and less on boots on the ground. Boots on the ground are primarily useful for occupying territory of a population that is not amenable to you, and rooting out guerilla’s. A conventional army invading can be fought off with air force and bombardment support for ground troops, while such tactics can’t work against a guerilla force. So we’ll see how this advances in the next year, I’m not really hopeful, but I don’t expect a draft to be instated.
6. Conclusion
If this conflict continues it could begin to shape up into Vietnam style spending on an endless defense campaign as we dig in further and are unwilling to negotiate or find any common ground while we escalate the rhetoric.
So far $84.86 billion in spending has been authorized across 3 bills for the support of Ukraine. Not all of this money has been spent, in fact it’s quite likely that the broad majority of it has not been spent yet as these bills authorize spending for the next several years as well as for 2022. If bills like this continue to keep getting signed or if we escalate our posture even further it’s quite likely that in 2023 we will start to eclipse Vietnam level spending on this conflict. The West is currently outspending Russia several times over on this conflict, but it’s unsure if that over-spend is really showing in terms of results as this appears to be a stalemate where one side gets pushed back, then the other does, then they stall out and get pushed back, etc etc. etc.
This post isn’t really here to provide any over-arching conclusions. I just wanted to know how much had been authorized in total for Ukraine so far and couldn’t easily find the information anywhere so I made it myself.
Enjoy. Please feel free to leave comments further expanding on any of the line items, correcting me, or discussing any other authorizations of expenditures on this conflict that may occur.
This was pretty epic dude ..Thank you for your service sir ...Hoorah! .. "We all know Elton John fucks, but man, he needs to slow down." ☠️
Thanks again for the high quality analysis, not only on the financial details of these bills but also comparisons of other systems and the world in general.
You're comment on oligarch 'mysterious' deaths is gold. I hadn't thought about it that way, but it fits perfectly with the west's myopia on how the rest of the world thinks.