With Americans focused on Donald Trump’s deeply unpopular war against Iran, far too few Americans are focusing on another disastrous Trump idea: increasing the Pentagon’s budget to a colossal $1.5tn. Just as Trump’s Iran war has hurt millions of Americans by sending gas prices skyward, Trump’s supersized Pentagon budget will hurt millions of Americans because Trump, to help finance that budget, is pushing for painful cuts in health, education, and housing programs.
By proposing a record-breaking $445bn increase in military spending, Trump is showing he’s gung-ho for guns, but not for butter, even though millions of Americans are struggling financially and are eager for more butter – social spending – to make their lives easier. Trump’s proposed military budget would mean a spectacular jump – it would be 42% above this year’s budget and two-thirds bigger than Joe Biden’s last Pentagon budget. Asserting that human needs are woefully underfunded, a coalition of 289 groups denounced Trump’s “gigantic” increase as “grossly irresponsible”, especially since the US already spends more on its military than the next nine biggest defense-spending countries combined.
Trump evidently wants this $445bn increase so he can thump his chest even more about the US’s military might and brag about all the shiny, new hardware he is building, especially the new Trump-class “Golden Fleet” battleships named after you-know-who. (Those battleships will cost an astonishing $9bn to $13bn each.) Beyond that $445bn jump in military spending, let’s not forget that Trump wants Congress to approve a separate $200bn for his not-so-successful war against Iran.
Trump’s Pentagon spending spree could prove disastrous in several ways. To help fund his increase, Trump is seeking a 10% cut in discretionary domestic spending, chopping such popular programs as medical research, job training, home heating assistance, environmental protection and disaster relief after hurricanes. After all the grievous damage that Trump has already done to government programs, the public doesn’t want more cuts – it wants increased spending on healthcare and other social programs.
At a private Easter luncheon, Trump made some widely derided comments about his desire to cut social programs to finance his military ambitions. “We’re fighting wars,” he said. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare … They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”
Republican politicians can’t be happy that Trump said this in a midterm election year when many Americans – squeezed by rising prices and $4-a-gallon gas – are struggling to afford daycare and healthcare. Republican lawmakers no doubt regret Trump’s suggestion that he might cut Medicare because that program, with 70 million participants, is immensely popular, and the last thing Republicans want is to anger older voters. Adding to Republicans’ discomfort, Trump’s remarks come even after he has repeatedly promised that he would not cut Medicare and Medicaid. (And Trump’s statement that Medicare can be done “on a state basis” shows an astounding ignorance about how one of the largest federal programs works. Trump fails to realize that Medicare is entirely federally funded with states contributing nothing to it.)
Another problem: Trump’s $445bn increase for the military would send the nation’s debt further into the stratosphere. By creating a far higher baseline budget for the Pentagon, Trump’s $445bn hike would increase the federal debt by a massive $5.8tn over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. And that’s after many budget watchdogs warned that the so-called “big beautiful bill’s” huge tax cuts for the rich and corporations would increase Washington’s budget deficit and push the worrisomely high federal debt, $39tn, even higher.
Trump’s Pentagon budget will mean big profits for military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which each donated $1m to his inaugural committee. Discussing the $445bn increase, Robert Weissman, co-president of the non-profit Public Citizen, said: “It’s beyond the wildest dreams of the military-industrial complex.”
While Trump hobnobs with the super-rich at fundraisers, he seems to have missed how hard things have gotten for the Americans he promised would be forgotten no longer. Many Americans will no doubt grumble that Trump wants to give $445bn more to the Pentagon after he opposed approving $60bn to extend Obamacare subsidies for two years. Without those subsidies, healthcare premiums have soared for 20 million Americans, causing many people to pay premium increases of more than $2,000 a year.
Democrats have seized on Trump’s decision to put the Pentagon budget on steroids. Patty Murray, the senior Democrat on the Senate appropriations committee, said: “President Trump wants to slash medical research to fund costly foreign wars. It doesn’t get more backward than that.”
Under Trump’s proposal, at least $4.5tn more would be spent on the Pentagon over the next decade. A more peace-loving president might use that $4.5tn in other, better ways to improve people’s lives. With that money, the US could restore the “big beautiful bill’s” almost $920bn in cuts to Medicaid, which are expected to push an estimated 10 million people off health insurance. That money could also be used to restore the $200bn in cuts for nutrition assistance.
That would still leave plenty of money to achieve a major goal: eliminating the country’s housing shortage and thereby reduce rents and housing prices. The US has an estimated shortage of 4m housing units, and the cost of building that many affordable units would be about $1.8tn (at $450,000 a unit).
Even after that, there would be money left to finance Joe Biden’s innovative proposal to cap childcare costs at 7% of income for all working families, for children from birth to age five. That would cost $225bn over 10 years. There’d also be money for universal pre-school for three- and four-year olds. (a $200bn cost). Plus, there’d be money to reduce the Medicare age from 65 to 60 ($30bn a year).
To be sure, there’s justification for some increases in Pentagon spending – for instance, to replenish stockpiles of Patriot interceptors and Tomahawk missiles, although that would cost a tiny fraction of $445bn. Knowing how Trump operates, if Congress approves Trump’s supersized Pentagon budget, Trump will no doubt say this shows that Congress has given its seal of approval to his war against Iran, to his other military actions against Venezuela, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen – and to his future military adventurism.
The Washington Post reported that some administration officials admitted that they’re flummoxed about how they would spend the new mountain of money proposed for the Pentagon. Complicating matters is Pete Hegseth’s shaky history as a manager. Before he became a Fox News anchor and Secretary of Defense, he managed – many would say mismanaged – a small non-profit veterans’ group. Under Hegseth, that outfit ended up having debt problems and fizzling. One might wonder how Hegseth will handle a $445bn budget increase, which is nearly 50,000 times larger than the veterans’ group’s budget. What’s more, Trump is seeking this gigantic increase in military spending even though the Pentagon received a failing grade on an audit last year as well as every other year since Congress required annual audits starting in 2018.
In seeking a mammoth increase in military spending while cutting social programs, Trump is again showing how hollow his promises were about making life better for typical Americans. With inflation rising and the economy slowing, it’s time for Americans to band together to demand that Republicans and Democrats in Congress shoot down Trump’s fantasies of a supersized Pentagon budget so that those trillions of dollars can be spent in ways that truly lift the lives of average Americans.
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Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
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