Should Congress Play a Role in Arms Sales?

Alex Stark for wrote for Lawfare on the Administration's move to end the informal practice of notifying Congress ahead of major arms sales.

Going forward, congressional oversight of arms sales will also be one of the few tools available to recalibrate the United States’s relationship with problematic security partners like Saudi Arabia by exercising meaningful leverage when these partners take actions that undermine U.S. strategic objectives, especially when the Trump administration would rather maintain the status quo in these relationships. As Senator Graham told Fox News Sunday last year, “I’ve got a real problem with going back to do doing business as usual with Saudi Arabia [on arms sales] …. Saudi Arabia is a strategic ally, but the Crown Prince was, in my opinion, involved in the murder of Mr. Khashoggi. And he’s done a lot of other disruptive things.”

The problem of executive overreach in national security policy is not just a Trump problem. While Trump has brought this issue to a crisis point, the problem of declining congressional oversight of U.S. national security policy has been a constant over the past few decades. To address this issue, advocates have promoted “flipping the script” on arms sales, which would have Congress vote affirmatively to approve any arms sales—an approach modeled on legislation introduced by then-Senator Biden in 1986. While such reforms may be a stretch for a deeply polarized Congress, Congress should at least hold on to its existing ability to weigh in on arms sales via the notification period and the ability to place holds on arms sales regardless of which party is in the White House.

The Trump administration is right in one sense: Congressional notification does slow down the arms sales process. But due deliberation is a good thing when deciding whether to provide U.S.-manufactured weapons to foreign governments. By doing away with this norms-driven tradition, the Trump administration would decrease transparency and accountability around U.S. foreign policy and weaken one of the few tools Congress and the public have to reset the nation’s relationship with security partners like Saudi Arabia that have “become a disruptive force” in the Middle East.