Today, Congress plans to spend more than a trillion dollars on our national defense, homeland security, and intelligence gathering activities. Thanks to

these efforts we have not had any attacks on American soil since 9/11. Prior to 9/11, however, mainland America had not been attacked either and we were not spending trillions of dollars.

This begs the question: Would trillions of dollars still be needed?

It is also important to note that in 2022 no one in our military was killed in combat. During President Donald Trump’s first term in office 65 soldiers were killed in combat (45 in Afghanistan). However, when you spend $1.5 million on each ATACMS missile given to support our allies’ wars, and the huge cost of military hardware and equipment, billions can quickly turn into trillions.

Heck, the military equipment and supplies that we left behind in Afghanistan during our botched departure from there would pay for our entire suicide prevention program for decades.

Former President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation in his farewell address that we should tread carefully on the development of a Military-Industrial Complex – a.k.a. our Defense Industrial Base — as doing so could be to the nation’s detriment. Eisenhower said that it could force us into deficit spending.

Well, we have ignored that recommendation from one of America’s legendary generals.

We spend more on defense than the next nine leading defense spending countries combined. The Trump administration plans to increase those numbers significantly.

But let us remember, Osama Bin Laden did not feel he could defeat or critically harm America with three planes. His intent was to bankrupt the country via our over reaction to the three planes. Today, about 25 years later, America has a $36 trillion national debt. It cannot pay its bills; we have a $1.8 trillion annual deficit — that too shows no signs of improving. Yet we will spend a trillion dollars on just the Defense Department.

This week America will witness the deaths via suicide of about 1,000 of its people. To help prevent these needless deaths we spent less than $3 billion on mental health, with a fraction of those funds going to suicide prevention.

Something is wrong here. Mental illness is a crisis in America. It has an effect on nearly every family. The nearly 1,000 lives lost weekly via suicides does not include the fact that nearly all mass shootings targeting innocent children have been perpetrated by people who are mentally ill.

Suicides draw little to no attention in the media. We pay more attention to a plane crash than to the growing number of suicides. We must add to this problem a related problem — homelessness in America. We recently witnessed a 18% increase in the homelessness rate, bringing the numbers close to 800,000 Americans. That is equivalent to the entire population of San Francisco, Denver, or Seattle. Among many of their problems, mental illness is highly likely for the homeless.

We are doing far too little in these categories.

One may say it costs money to come close to solving these problems. Well, yes. But there would be fewer Fortune 500 companies if it were not for the trillions of dollars the U.S. government gives to the Defense Industrial Base.

These companies are also providing millions of jobs for Americans via federal contracts.

Lesson to be learned — if we put a fraction of the dollars going to the Defense Industrial Base towards “real efforts” to prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans yearly from suicides and to address the mental health crisis and homelessness in America, we could also create hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs for Americans who would truly be saving lives instead of fighting the elusive “boogeyman.”

Job creation will help get us out of our fiscal crisis and we do not have to wait for the jobs to reappear from China and other highly tariffed countries to do so.

Creating new jobs immediately in America will result in more tax revenue, and help buttress Medicare and the Social Security Trust Funds, as these new workers would contribute to all those entities via payroll deductions. It is our poor labor force participation levels that is hampering America fiscally. Thirty-eight percent of Americans are not part of the U.S. workforce.

There are numerous and cost-effective ways to tackle suicide, mental illness, and our homeless problem. I have many in mind, but there are those much wiser than me who can help.

With American ingenuity and the proper financial incentives, the public and private sectors can come up with real solutions to abate our current problems in the aforementioned areas.

We are America. We have the talent to fix this. We put a man on the moon. But today, we need more social scientists than rocket scientists.

— Gary Franks served three terms as a congressman from Connecticut’s 5th District. He was the first Black conservative elected to Congress and first Black Republican elected to the House in nearly 60 years.