Inside Trump's $1 trillion military bonanza
The White House recently released a preview of Donald Trump’s 2026 budget request, with the full proposal expected later this month. For now, topline figures for broad government functions are available and not much else. Still, the preview has enough information to clarify the Trump administration’s priorities.
Those priorities align with those outlined by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) back in July — spend more on the military and less on nearly everything else.
“To meet our defense needs, Congress has to work to grow our economy and significantly reduce our overall spending. I can promise you that come 2025, spending reform will be a top priority for our new Republican majority…Congress has to prioritize the truly essential needs of our nation and our national security has to be at the top of that list.”
Trump is proposing a $1.01 trillion military budget — $119 billion more than this year — alongside a $259 billion cut to non-military spending. The result is a $140 billion drop in the overall discretionary budget. (The discretionary budget is proposed by the president, enacted by Congress, and funds federal agencies’ operations. The mandatory budget is primarily payments for benefits programs like Social Security and Medicare that are funded automatically. See this helpful CBO graphic for an overview).
What’s more, 40% of non-military spending is for the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Veterans Affairs. That leaves just 24% of Trump’s proposed budget for departments not involved in military, military-adjacent, or policing functions. These departments are responsible for funding and implementing programs related to education, environment, food and water safety, health, housing, infrastructure, and more.
With his $1 trillion Pentagon budget request, Trump is proposing that the US spend as much on its military next year as it did annually from 1942–45, on average. Effectively, Trump is asking Congress for a World War II-sized military budget despite there being no world war (thankfully). Today, US troop deployments are at a historic low.
The Pentagon budget is already larger than the GDP of all but 20 countries — about the same as Switzerland’s — and is in the same ballpark as the military budgets during the peak of the “global war on terror,” which included about 200,000 US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latest Pentagon spending spree under Trump and Biden has triggered a new nuclear arms race, heightened the risk of intentional or accidental war with China, and funded the escalation of a seemingly endless regional war in the Middle East.
A golden dome and a gutted social safety net
Trump is requesting $1 trillion in military spending as one in ten children face food insecurity, one in four adults experience financial hardship, and homelessness is at a record high. Human security — which includes reliable access to food, income, and shelter — is deteriorating in a nation that spends more on its military than the next 12 highest-spending countries combined.
Through its $1 trillion Pentagon spending proposal and drastic cuts to social programs, Trump’s budget sends a clear message: welfare is fine, so long as it’s for corporations and billionaire allies. More than half of the annual military budget goes to private companies through contracts. Investigations have found systematic profiteering by military contractors on almost everything the Pentagon buys. On paper, contracts typically allow for private profits of 12–15%, but in practice, contractors regularly secure profits of 40–50%, and sometimes much more. For example, the Pentagon paid TransDigm $119 million for spare parts that should have cost about a quarter of that.
Despite record profits and cash flow, military contractors are spending more of their revenue on cash dividends and stock buybacks and less on R&D and capital expenditures, leaving it to taxpayers to cover those expenses. Last year, Lockheed Martin — the leading recipient of Pentagon contracts — spent $7 billion on stock buybacks and dividends. The department could crack down on this malpractice immediately, considering the immense leverage it has over arms companies that rely on military contracts. But what incentive does Pentagon leadership have to do so when Congress approves unconditional increases to its budget nearly every year?
There has been a surge of tech industry entrants into the arms business, seeking to capitalize on Pentagon largesse. The potential to make a taxpayer-funded fortune through the military budget attracts exactly the type of people you’d expect.
Elon Musk spent more than a quarter-billion dollars getting Trump elected in 2024. Investors bet on that investment paying dividends — SpaceX’s market valuation increased by $140 billion from June to December 2024 alone. Last month, Musk’s SpaceX received a $6 billion contract from the Pentagon, more than the company had received in unclassified contracts in all prior years combined. Notably, the Pentagon is pretty much the only place that Musk’s DOGE isn’t cutting: Military contracts make up 60% of all federal contracts but account for less than 0.05% of the contracts DOGE says it has terminated.
Reporting indicates that more contract dollars for Musk are almost certainly on the way. SpaceX is reportedly a frontrunner to be the primary contractor for the “Golden Dome” project, Trump’s proposed $25 billion missile shield that’s widely regarded as fantastical — “economically ruinous and strategically unwise,” as one nuclear weapons expert put it. A recent letter to the Pentagon’s Inspector General, signed by more than 40 members of Congress, requested a review of Musk’s influence over the project. The letter is addressed to the acting Inspector General because Trump fired the person nominated for that position in January.
The Golden Dome is part of a $150 billion military spending provision included in the GOP reconciliation bill. Trump assumes this bill will eventually become law: his proposed $119 billion military spending increase — resulting in the $1.01 trillion Pentagon budget for next year — is funded entirely by that projected additional funding. Five Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee voted with Republicans last week to advance the $150 billion military spending proposal. Runaway military spending, it turns out, is a bipartisan problem.
 | A guest post by
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By the way, this is how you know Elon Musk and DOGE aren't serious actors. The Pentagon is the basically the poster child for wasteful government spending.
$865B is an obscene amount of money to throw at the war profiteers. $1.1T is unthinkable. But then again you can be sure that every member of Congress, every single one, is making bank on dividends and buybacks in war profiteer stock. And we don't even need to talk about throwing money at Elon F'king Musk. There needs to be a 50% cut in the Pentagon budget. Our national security would not be impacted in the slightest.