WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said he wants to increase the amount of money for the U.S. military, a goal that runs counter to efforts from his top ally — Elon Musk — to slash trillions of dollars of federal spending.
“We want to raise defense spending. I think we have to have it,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, taped last week and broadcast Monday.
Trump added that he might seek to pull back on military budgets in the future, saying that he plans to talk to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin about curbing defense spending.
“One of the things I’ll be doing with President Xi and with Putin and everybody else is saying, let’s ease up on all this, you know, building all of this, you know, the bombs,” he said, calling it “crazy” to spend large amounts of money on weapons that may not be used.
Military spending accounted for nearly half of the $1.8 trillion worth of U.S. discretionary spending in fiscal year 2024, making it the largest pool of federal money outside of mandatory spending on entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and other benefits. The U.S. spends more on defense than the next nine largest countries combined, according to data compiled by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
Trump’s suggestion to boost military spending comes at an uncertain moment for federal agencies and the contractors that work with them.
The president said in an interview over the weekend that Musk’s group of cost cutters, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would soon take a look at the Defense Department’s financial records.
Musk, the world’s richest man, has been critical of many Pentagon efforts, calling for some weapons programs to be “completely redone” and for “immediate and dramatic changes.”
DOGE teams have fanned out across the federal bureaucracy to review payments, systems and employee communications. The Trump administration has moved quickly to curb spending at some of the first agencies that the DOGE campaign has singled out. At the most maximal levels, they’ve effectively halted all work at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, prompting lawsuits challenging the legality of those acts.
Musk’s tactics have generated a series of practical, legal and political questions as to how DOGE — set up as an office in the White House — could accomplish such ambitious goals with only limited authority.
Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, has said he wants to cut as much as $2 trillion worth of federal spending, an amount that accounts for more than all U.S. discretionary spending in a single year.
His role in auditing the Pentagon’s expenses has also raised conflicts of interest questions. SpaceX has received billions of dollars in federal contracts, including at the Department of Defense in recent years.
Any attempt to slash defense programs and other spending is likely to touch off a fierce debate in Congress. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to direct federal spending, limiting the White House’s ability to act unilaterally.
Republicans hold narrow majorities in both the House and Senate. They’ve struggled in recent years to pass spending bills, needing Democrats’ assistance to do so. Given broad Democratic opposition to many of the cuts Musk’s DOGE effort has steered so far, Republicans must unify in order to enact Trump’s agenda.
Raising — or cutting — defense spending could prove a complication. While a faction of Republicans have called for steep spending cuts overall and don’t see a way to reach their fiscal goals without trimming defense spending, many others share Trump’s objectives of raising defense spending even further.
What’s more, the defense budget is broadly spread across the U.S. Military bases, other facilities and programs are located in so many states and districts that historically any suggestion of cutbacks prompts members of Congress to defend their own parochial interests.
Trump has said he won’t agree to any changes to Social Security and Medicare, the biggest buckets of federal spending, and among the most popular. And by calling for more — not less — defense spending, he’s giving Musk and Congress little wiggle room to trim government costs.
Fox News’ Baier pressed Trump about how he would finance all those programs, in addition to a large-scale tax cut Republicans are planning for later this year.
Trump reiterated he would raise “tremendous amounts of money on tariffs.”
While estimates show that Trump’s most expansive tariff plans could raise several hundred billion dollars a year, that would still fall short of the money needed to offset the tax cuts.
___
©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
