This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
One trillion!
It’s an exclamation-point-inducing, mind-jarringly inconceivable number for most humans. Start counting once every second and you’ll need more than 31,700 years to get there.
It’s also the ALL-CAPS amount of money President Trump wants to spend on defense—amid the frenzied downsizing of the rest of the federal government—in fiscal year 2026.
“COMING SOON,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X last month, “the first TRILLION dollar @DeptofDefense budget.”
Thank you Mr. President!
COMING SOON: the first TRILLION dollar
@DeptofDefense budget.President
@realDonaldTrump is rebuilding our military — and FAST.(PS: we intend to spend every taxpayer dollar wisely — on lethality and readiness)
pic.twitter.com/WcZlNAHgDG— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth)
April 7, 2025
But will it be? Military leaders are on Capitol Hill this week to begin hashing that out.
If you’re like most Americans, you’ve given up trying to make sense of your cell phone bill. So we know what you’re thinking: Don’t even start trying to explain our budget for national defense.
The Pentagon’s annual topline budget weighs in at more than 300 pages. But that’s just the start. There are thousands of documents, attachments, and PowerPoints, covering everything from the billions that the DOD asks for to order more F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets to the six figures the Army budgets for apprehending military deserters.
Then there is the extra tens of billions for defense-related spending by other agencies to manage things like nuclear weapons and cybersecurity. That money gets sprinkled on top of the Department of Defense’s $900-plus billionish budget to make up our overall annual bill for national defense.
The point is: The average person does not have time to really digest this stuff. So at The War Horse, we’ve consulted with 10 experts and insiders—from congressional aides and budget researchers to former DOD money stewards and think-tank defense analysts across the political spectrum. We asked them to help us demystify the Pentagon budget so every American taxpayer can feel empowered to start following the billions.
Let’s get started.
Q: What’s a “skinny” budget? And is the Pentagon’s as fat as advertised?
A new president means new priorities—as if we haven’t noticed. So the new administration issues what’s known as a “skinny budget” to reflect the coming changes while it fattens up the guts and details that we’ll see in the coming weeks. Trump’s 2026 “skinny” came out May 2, touting less DEI and USAID and more peace through strength and rebuilding America’s military.
The price tag for national defense: $1.01 trillion. The Pentagon’s $961.6 billion cut of that, however, is a point of contention. Our chart below shows the dramatic funding ups and downs in the president’s preliminary budget. Read on for more about the drama brewing over the Pentagon’s take.
If you can't see this chart, click here.
Q: Why are lawmakers from Trump’s own party so unhappy?
Top Republicans in Congress want more money for defense. They say the White House’s budget architects are using accounting tricks to stretch national defense funding past the trillion mark. They point out the president's proposal is relying on an extra $119 billion for defense from a separate, still-in-the-works piece of legislation that Trump has called the “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill. Unlike with a typical spending bill, Republicans, who control both the House and Senate, only need a simple majority to push through this bill, which avoids the risk of a filibuster in the Senate.
Q: What’s the difference where the money comes from?
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought insisted that the White House had a crafty strategy in mind: “...reconciliation ensures that the money is available when needed, and not held hostage by Democrats to force wasteful non-defense discretionary spending increases as was the case in the President's first term.”
But House and Senate Republicans in the Armed Services committees had intended money from the reconciliation bill to be a sweetener to an already-accelerated defense spending plan. They want it to bankroll major initiatives, like providing $24.7 billion to kickstart Trump’s Golden Dome anti-missile shield and throwing an extra $33.7 billion into shipbuilding on top of the tens of billions the U.S. is already spending to modernize its fleet. The chart below provides a closer look.
If you can't see this chart, click here.
Q: What’s driving the debate?
The is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-trillion drama comes as defense hawks point to the steepest rise in military spending across the globe since the end of the Cold War. Meanwhile, Democrats are condemning the anticipated historic cuts to everything from environmental regulation and scientific research to small business grants and housing assistance—not to mention $49 billion in cuts to international aid or so called “soft power.”
And that’s sparking tension over how much money the U.S. should be committing to the military.
Q. Will national defense soon make up a bigger share of federal spending?
It's looking that way. The president’s proposed budget is calling for 23% cuts in non-defense discretionary spending in 2026.
The definitions for what’s considered defense spending and what’s not aren’t so clear-cut. For example, Trump wants a $42.3 billion infusion that would hike the Department of Homeland Security's budget by 65%. But even though that’s the agency that oversees the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, only a small portion of its spending is categorized in the budget world as defense spending.
National defense spending accounts for about 15 cents of every dollar the U.S. spends. Only Medicare (17%) and Social Security (16.3%) get more, and those are considered mandatory spending that Congress doesn’t appropriate each year. Veterans benefits and services, which fall outside of national defense, get about 4 cents a dollar.
This next chart shows the $5.1 trillion in bills the government racked up during the first half of FY 2025.
If you can't see this chart, click here.
Q: What’s the most the U.S. Department of Defense has budgeted after World War II?
In dollars alone, it was FY 2023 at about $874.3 billion, according to the National Defense Budget Estimates known as the DOD Green Book. But in adjusted-for-inflation dollars, 2008— when we were at war in both Iraq and Afghanistan—was the largest. That year, the Pentagon budget reached a record $996 billion.
Our interactive chart of nearly eight decades of Department of Defense budgets provides a look back.
If you can't see this chart, click here.
Q: Does the U.S. really spend that much more than the rest of the world?
The world spent $2.718 trillion on its militaries in 2024—let that sink in—and the United States spent 37 cents of every one of those dollars.
That’s according to the data crunchers at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute whose annual report, released in late April, is an authority on global military expenditures.
Using SIPRI’s broader definition of military spending, the U.S. spends more than the next nine countries combined. Drill down on the numbers in our next chart.
If you can't see this chart, click here.
Q. What’s all the talk about China catching up?
Modernizing our stockpile to deter countries like China is all the rage. China has been modernizing its military for three decades and boosted spending by 7% last year, according to the SIPRI study. But by some accounts, the U.S. still triples China in military spending. Take major weapons systems.
If you can't see this chart, click here.
In FY 2025, the U.S. planned to invest $310.7 billion—split between procurement and R&D—on building up our arsenal. Republicans argue that spending superiority is a deterrent. The U.S. major weapons budget is only a few billion dollars less than China’s entire 2024 military budget, according to the SIPRI report.
But is it that easy to compare? Peter Robertson, an economics professor at the University of Western Australia, cautions that our vastly different economies inflate the perceived gap between the two superpowers. If assessing by purchasing power, he estimates China’s military spending is closer to $541 billion. But that’s still in the neighborhood of just 60% of the United States' military spending.
Russia, mired in an ongoing war with Ukraine, spent a record $148.9 billion on its military in 2024—a staggering 36% year-over-year increase. Ukraine spent $64.7 billion—an astounding 54% of its government spending. After the Hamas attack, Israel’s military spending skyrocketed 69% in 2024 to $46.5 billion.
Q: What’s in the new spending packages for service members?
There’s about $9 billion proposed in the reconciliation bill for so-called quality of life initiatives, such as long-overdue upgrades to military housing and barracks construction, health care, and assistance to military families. That’s only about 6 cents from every dollar in the bill.
But a look at the chart below shows how expensive it is to train, pay, feed, house, and provide medical care and other benefits for service members, budget experts say. Each military base is like a small town with schools and commissaries. Costs skyrocket when troops are deployed to war zones.
The Pentagon has about $181.8 billion for military personnel costs in its current budget, including $88.6 billion for enlisted pay and benefits, including housing allowances, and another $43.8 billion for officers. Operations and maintenance for everything from aircraft carriers to base schools make up by far the biggest costs—about 40% of the budget. The Navy budgeted $12 billion just on ship depot maintenance.
If you can't see this chart, click here.
Oh, and speaking of moldy barracks, send us your photos and brief descriptions of sub-standard living quarters and we’ll make sure the people with the purse strings know where those billions are needed.
Q: What happened to the Defense Secretary’s call for 8% annual spending cuts?
During the height of the Department of Government Efficiency’s assault on federal spending, Hegseth signaled the DOD was falling in line: He called for 8% annual budget cuts over the next five years—close to $250 billion. And on April 10, the Defense Secretary triumphantly signed a memorandum terminating $5.1 billion in what he called wasteful spending on IT consulting contracts that he said the Pentagon can perform in-house.
But now we know those proposed 8% cuts won’t result in a smaller Pentagon budget. Just as the sharpening of red pencils commenced, Hegseth announced he would be redirecting those savings toward the administration’s goal of restoring the military’s “warrior ethos.” The 47th president of the United States had announced plans for the Golden Dome and that Boeing would be building the next generation F-47 fighter jet.
Q: What happened after President Trump’s trillion-dollar promise?
The defense industry perked up the day after the president, seated next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, shared his plans for the first trillion-dollar defense budget.
On April 8—the day after Trump’s declaration and almost a week into the tariff-fueled stock market meltdown—the S&P Aerospace & Defense Select Industry Index became the first sector to stick its head out of the financial bunker.
It gained more than 1%, while the S&P 500 tumbled another 1.3%. Since then, defense stocks have soared more than 20%, outperforming the recovering market.
If you can't see this chart, click here.
Q: Is anyone with close ties to the White House in a position to benefit?
On April 17, Reuters reported that SpaceX, Musk’s rocket and satellite company, is leading a bid to help build the proposed Golden Dome with Peter Thiel’s software firm Palantir and drone maker Anduril. Dozens of companies, including old-guard firms Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and RTX, want a piece of the project, as do new players from Silicon Valley.
Reuters reports that Space X has estimated that the preliminary engineering and design work for a network of satellites designed to detect and warn of incoming missiles could cost between $6 to $10 billion. The overall cost of the project could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, some experts say.
Musk, who donated more than $280 million to President Trump and Republicans during the 2024 campaign, posted that the Reuters story “is not true,” but didn’t elaborate.
Q: Didn’t the U.S. try to build a missile-defense system before? How much did that cost?
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Motors landed big contracts after President Reagan announced in 1983 plans to build the SDI ballistic missile defense system dubbed Star Wars.
The problem-laden program was scrapped more than a decade and at least $30 billion later.
When the New York Times exposed how the Army had rigged a test by planting a remote-controlled explosive on a target missile, former Reagan administration officials argued the performance was more about impressing our Soviet adversaries than making the defense system actually work.
Q: Which defense contractors are doing the most business with the U.S. government?
Defense contractors made up seven of the federal government’s top 10 contractors in FY 2023, including the top five on the list. The chart shows how that group racked up more than $190 billion in contracts.
If you can't see this chart, click here.
Lockheed Martin, maker of the troubled F-35, and the Trident II missile, stands out on just about any list. It more than doubled its closest competitor, with $70 billion in contracts in 2023. That was nearly 1 out of every 10 dollars the government obligated that year, according to USASpending.gov.
The company spent more than $12.5 million in lobbying in 2024. But it goes both ways. William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft whose upcoming book is called The Trillion Dollar War Machine, points out how shipbuilding in Mississippi and missile defense companies in Alabama are well-positioned to prosper from the $150 billion in Pentagon reconciliation funds. Those are the home states of the bill’s two main proponents, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Alabama), who chair their chambers’ Armed Services Committees.
Q: With almost a trillion dollars flowing in, how does the DOD keep track of all that money?
When it comes to the Pentagon budget, researchers at the Congressional Budget Office talk about rounding to the nearest billion. But no matter who is commander in chief, the Defense Department has been notorious for being the federal government’s least accountable spender. It set aside $1.3 billion this fiscal year just to support an audit. Yet, it has famously failed to pass a single audit, been unable to account for more than half its assets, or keep track of billions of dollars in inventory.
But there was new money allocated in the “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill for that problem too—$400 million to upgrade the Pentagon’s financial management systems.
Here’s to more precise rounding.
Help us demystify the Pentagon budget
Have a question about how your tax dollars are spent for our national defense? Want to share a tip from the inside on how the Pentagon, Congress and White House are handling our money?
Write to contactus@thewarhorse.org or send us a secure message at thewarhorsenews@proton.me.
This War Horse explainer was reported by Mike Frankel, edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan. Hrisanthi Pickett produced the graphics and wrote the headlines.
Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
