THE SET-UP: Remember when DOGE was going to attack “waste, fraud and abuse” in the Pentagon’s budget?
I know it feels like two lifetimes ago, but if you close your eyes and think really hard … you may recall Trump saying the magical words “waste, fraud and abuse” and “Pentagon” in the same sentence. His exact words during a Super Bowl-linked interview were:
“Let's check the military. We're going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”
But that was then and this is now … and right now he’s in Saudi Arabia to sell American weapons to the Gulf’s Arab states. But weapons are only part of what’s on offer. Trump is also selling the continuation of America’s protection racket in the Persian Gulf. The Fifth Fleet is still based in Bahrain and, therefore, American taxpayers continue to guarantee the free flow* of oil into the global economy. They essentially subsidize Saudi control over OPEC’s oil production quotas. It’s a key cog—if not the key cog—in the global economy. So, Trump didn’t mention the “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” Musk has yet to find (or even try to find), but instead touted his Administration’s defense budget hitting the trillion dollar mark.
In fact, that number is going to be much higher when it ultimately includes “defense-related” spending like maintaining the nuclear arsenal, which falls under the Department of Energy’s budget.
The upshot is, of course, that DOGE ended-up as yet another example of the Pentagon’s invincibility. It has been chewing up and spitting out accusations of “waste, fraud and abuse” for decades. If you are old enough to remember picking up a ringing phone without knowing who might be on the other end of the call … you probably remember the apocryphal story of the $600 hammer or the all-too-real $640 toilet seat. Those stories epitomized the profligate spending of the Reagan Administration’s Pentagon. Those debt-generating defense budgets were sold under the guise of “The Reagan Doctrine,” a.k.a. “peace through strength.”
And there was Trump today in Riyadh, touting “peace through strength” and America’s world-dwarfing military. Amazingly, he’s also resurrected and rebranded Reagan’s pie-in-the-sky Star Wars missile defense ploy. Now it’s the “Golden Dome” and instead of digging through the defense budget for savings, Musk is a leading contender to rake in defense budget cash as the Golden Dome’s lead contractor. - jp
(*I say “free flow” knowing full-well that the Saudis and their OPEC-Plus partners in Russia and the UAE manipulate the “free-flow” by imposing artificially scarcity on the oil market. Oil is as much, if not more about keeping it in the ground as it is about pulling it out. It’s a dynamic Trump doesn’t seem to understand.)
TITLE: The Very Conventional Defense Budget
https://www.hoover.org/research/very-conventional-defense-budget
EXCERPTS: With Republicans in control, Congress is proceeding toward adding $150 billion to the $886 billion FY 2025 Defense budget, a 17% increase. President Trump has requested about the same amount ($1 trillion) for next year. This supplemental by the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) has some Democratic support, signaling growing unease about our military capabilities.
The 59 members of HASC, aided by a hundred staff, allocated the money across more than 180 line items. Each representative supported his or her favorite program(s). Although the result lacked strategic coherence, it did emphasize four themes.
First, shipbuilding received $34 billion, the largest share. This reflected deserved unease about China’s bellicosity in the Pacific as well as recognition that every president since Teddy Roosevelt has dispatched our warships whenever and wherever crises brew. Our fleet has shrunk far below the size needed to carry out such deployments wisely imposed by a succession of commanders-in-chief.
Second, President Trump requested a “Golden Dome.” Congress put in $25 billion. A credible defense of Hawaii, Alaska, and the continent against sub-launched cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drone swarms would consume a decade of Defense budgets. Our doctrine must remain mutual assured destruction. While Golden Dome needs a lot more thought, funding research across a spectrum of technologies is prudent. Third, missiles and munitions received $20 billion, sorely needed.
The fourth theme is that HASC hewed to a very conventional budget. The loser was the absence of insistence by HASC upon a high-tech, low cost per unit modification that exploited lessons from Ukraine and enticed software talent and innovation from the civilian sector to collaborate with defense industries. As a result, unmanned systems and attack drones received a paltry $4 billion. That will pay for about 80,000 drones at the exorbitant U.S. price of $50,000 per unit. Ukraine expends more than a million drones a year.
TITLE: When a Trillion Is Not a Trillion: The Pentagon’s Budget Request
https://inkstickmedia.com/when-a-trillion-is-not-a-trillion-the-pentagons-budget-request/
EXCERPTS: A more realistic strategy could provide a robust defense for far less than $1 trillion per year. The new approach should abandon our current “cover the globe” military posture, which calls for the ability to intervene anywhere in the world on short notice.
In addition, it should rely more on allies to provide defenses for their own regions. It should abandon the Pentagon’s current quest for a new generation of nuclear weapons in favor of a stance of “minimum deterrence” — maintaining enough nuclear weapons to dissuade another country from attacking the United States, and no more. And it should move towards more affordable, reliable weapons systems instead of costly, complex, and unreliable systems like the F-35.
The other problem with boosting the Pentagon and cutting virtually everything else is that it will leave America ill-prepared to address non-military threats from climate change to pandemics to the opioid crisis. And virtually eliminating USAID while cutting back on funding for the State Department will deprive the US of non-military tools of influence that are often more applicable and more effective in dealing with major security challenges.
Ideally, Congress would subject the new budget proposal to deep scrutiny and put forward a more balanced alternative. But partisan divisions and a fear among many members to speak out forcefully on issues labeled “national security” suggest that alternative views may have to come from elsewhere — from independent experts, media outlets, and the broader public. This is not the time to leave Pentagon spending and federal budget priorities to “the experts,” given what is at stake.
TITLE: The Trillion Dollar Trade Off: War & Weapons VS. Basic Needs
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2025/05/13/trillion-dollar-trade-what-if-presidents-budget-prioritized-communities-instead-war-profiteers/
EXCERPTS: While Pentagon contractors are set to receive record-high public subsidies, too many Americans are struggling to meet their basic needs. Despite being the richest country in the world, the U.S. has the lowest education and health outcomes and highest rate of child poverty among all economically advanced nations. Wealth inequality has never been higher - and three-quarters of the country are pessimistic about their children’s financial future.
A $1.01 trillion dollar investment could achieve ALL of the following:
Hire more than 350,328 registered nurses to fill the national nursing shortage (cost: $44.5 billion); AND
Insure and treat the one in five adults with opioid use disorder who have no health insurance (cost: $1.85 billion); AND
Provide health insurance for all four million uninsured children in this country (cost: $11.5 billion); AND
Provide affordable housing for all 3.9 million Americans who receive an eviction notice each year (cost: $37.5 billion) and all 653,000 Americans who experienced homelessness at last count - a record high (cost: $6.3 billion); AND
Expand Head Start services to cover all 3 million children under the age of five who live in poverty (cost: $28 billion); AND
Lift 1.5 million children out of poverty by making the Child Tax Credit fully refundable (cost: $30 billion); AND
Hire 407,000 Elementary School Teachers to fill the national teacher shortage (cost: $39.5 billion); AND
Provide four-year scholarships to all 3.9 million 2025 high school graduates (cost: $152 billion); AND
Replace lead pipes nationwide for safer drinking water (cost: $47 billion); AND
Build nationwide high-speed rail for faster, cleaner, and safer transportation (cost: $205 billion); AND
Erase all medical debt, which currently burdens 20 million Americans, nearly 1 in 12 adults nationally (cost: $220 billion); AND
Create 350,000 clean energy jobs (cost: $60.30 billion); AND
Send all 127.4 million households in the U.S. a $1,000 check to help offset the current cost-of-living crisis (cost: $127.4 billion).