one-upmanship

Reader's Digest 12/1月合併号の記事 'What A Waste!' からの引用です。

The Defence Department budget is massive, weighing in at more than $715 billion, and that doesn't include funds for Veterans Affairs. As one might imagine, with that much money floating around, it can--and does--become politicized. Finalized budgets, says Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, are the result of political virtue-signaling and one-upmanship on the part of Congress: "'You want to spend $500 billion? Well, I want to spend $700 billion' They don't actually know where that additional $200 billion needs to go. They just want to outspend somebody else."

"one-upmanship" の意味を調べます。

・Oxford English Dictionary: The technique or practice of gaining a feeling of superiority over another person.: the one-upmanship of who can get the best presents

・Collins Dictionary: If you refer to someone's behaviour as one-upmanship, you disapprove of them trying to make other people feel inferior in order to make themselves appear more important.: It was the expression of a man who'd won a trifling game of one-upmanship.

・Cambridge English Dictionary: a situation in which someone does or says something in order to prove that they are better than someone else: Officials complain of his habit of one-upmanship when arranging events with other ministers.

意味は違いますが、日本語のワンマンと似ていますね。