President Donald Trump last week announced new plans for a $1 trillion defense budget in 2026. Trump bragged about his big plans for spending ever larger amounts of taxpayer funds, stating at a meeting with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu that “We’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military ... $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.” An increase in military spending to $1 trillion is a funding increase of more than $100 billion, or 12 percent. It would be the largest single-year increase since 2004, during the early years of the Iraq war.
Trump made no mention of earlier claims that his administration would cut overall federal spending while cutting the federal government’s annual deficit.
It’s easy to see why he wouldn’t mention those earlier promises. In recent days, Elon Musk has backtracked on his earlier promises that the Department of Government Efficiency would cut $1 trillion in federal spending in the near future. The new figure offered by Musk is only fifteen percent of that, or $150 billion. In other words, when it comes to spending, DOGE’s “savings” amount to about 2.2 percent of federal spending.
Things aren’t looking good for anyone who actually believed the administration’s promises to cut overall federal spending.
Assuming that DOGE actually delivers $150 billion worth of cuts to federal spending, and assuming that the Trump administration uses DOGE cuts to offset military spending, that means every other category of federal spending could increase only $50 billion overall if the goal is a cut to federal spending. Moreover, even if federal spending is cut by, say, $50 billion, that still leaves a federal deficit of nearly $2 trillion.
After all, the Trump administration has promised to not touch Social Security and Medicare, which make up forty percent of federal spending all by themselves. Given the nature of those two nondiscretionary programs, we can be sure that they will only increase in coming years.
Moreover, there is nothing in any of the new budgets approved by Trump and the GOP Congress to suggest that overall federal spending will decrease in coming years. Yes, the GOP promises to cut spending “over ten years” but anyone who has paid any attention at all over the past 30 years knows that this never happens. As Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie has pointed out, nothing beyond year three of these amorphous ten-year plans ever happens.
It’s looking more and more like this playbook is following the exact same story that we’ve witnessed during every other Republican administration over the past forty years: there is a lot of talk of budget cutting, but in the end, the trajectory of federal spending is always relentlessly upward—often with bloated military budgets leading the way.
A Huge Increase in Military Spending
The federal military budget for 2025 is estimated to be approximately $893 billion. If military spending increases to $1 trillion, that’s an increase of $107 billion. That means federal spending will continue to be well in excess of anything spent on the Pentagon during the Cold War buildup of the Ronald Reagan years. This is true even if we adjust for inflation. Indeed, in inflation-adjusted dollars, a budget of $1 trillion puts military spending even above President Obama’s military budgets in the days when the US was waging counter insurgency wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump’s proposed 2026 increase of $106 would be the largest increase since 2004,and would certainly be among the largest year-over-year increases in military spending in fifty years.
Where the Rest of the Money Goes
In 2024, (the most recently completed fiscal and calendar year), total federal spending totaled approximately $6.7 billion. In that time, military spending was about 13 percent of the total. That puts it about third place behind Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt. Interest payments have ballooned in recent years thanks to runaway federal deficits and rising interest rates. Military spending was slightly ahead of government health spending like Medicaid. Veterans spending—which is really just a form of deferred military spending—was an additional five percent.
With the exception of military spending, most of this spending is “nondiscretionary,” meaning that Congress would have to change statutes to end automatic increases to spending in these areas.
That leaves some relatively minor programs—where most of the discretionary spending is found—such as education and research.
If the Trump Administration were actually serious about cuts to federal spending, military spending would be an easy place to start because of its discretionary nature. Moreover, the administration would not have signed off on the most recent continuing resolution which essentially continued the Biden administration’s budget into the fall.
Instead, the administration has decided to double down on increases to Pentagon spending. This is especially curious given how the administration’s DOGE efforts were supposedly based in uncovering wasteful spending and poor accounting in government department. The Pentagon, meanwhile, failed its seventh audit in a row in December of 2024. The Pentagon has no idea where that money goes, and neither does DOGE. Apparently, this is no obstacle to historically large increases in budget recommendations from the White House.
The administration’s incorrigible fanboys, of course, will insist that the administration will soon—surely any time now!—implement bigtime cuts to non-military discretionary spending. Even if that were politically plausible, we now know for sure that DOGE will do virtually nothing to significantly erase federal deficits. Given the refusal of the GOP and the Trump White House to implement any meaningful cuts to federal programs, it is mathematically impossible for the White House to sizably cut the deficit, even if Trump wiped out all non-military discretionary spending.
For more realistic observers of American politics, this is all barely even worth remarking on. It’s all unfolding exactly as we’d expect. Unfortunately, many of Trump’s supporters continue to kid themselves into thinking that something is in the works that will change the nation’s debt and spending trajectory. Anything is possible, but there is zero observable evidence to suggest anything of the sort will actually happen.
