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On April 3, four weeks after Donald Trump claimed the Iran War would be over in four to five weeks, and with his approval ratings in reputable polls dipping below 40 percent, the president made a wildly audacious ask: Congress, he said, should approve a Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion.
Such a number was unheard of. Congress gave the military an official budget of nearly $1.1 trillion for the 2025 fiscal year—more than the next five runners up (China, Russia, Germany, India, and the UK) combined. Now, counting supplemental funding for the War in Iran, which is entering its eighth month, Trump wants US taxpayers to shell out just under $1.6 trillion ($1,570,000,000,000) to a “Department of War” that’s so un-auditable it probably doesn’t know where it left the car keys.
That’s an increase of almost 50 percent for things that go boom.
“The true scale of the military budget is much larger than reported,” and the extent of the undercounting “is likely to stun most Americans.”
As much as we Americans may value our military readiness, 65 percent of US adults polled by the Washington Post in late April opposed Trump’s unprecedented funding request, and two-thirds disapproved of his “little excursion” in Iran. (They still do.) The disapproval numbers would be higher still, no doubt, if those people were aware of a dirty little secret: We’re already spending more—way more—than what the Pentagon reports, and most media outlets dutifully parrot.
A recent report I helped coauthor for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) estimates that, properly accounted for, US military expenditures last year were at least $1.5 trillion, and possibly a lot more. If Congress grants Trump’s requests, we’ll be spending $2 trillion to $3 trillion on the military and its wars.
This isn’t just about Trump, but rather the DC establishment. For decades, the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon have been obfuscating military spending by means of arcane bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. And yet most journalists and experts quote the official numbers, which are profoundly incomplete.
Consider, for example, that the Treasury Department covers about $100 billion of the annual cost of supporting retired military personnel. And that the $7.3 billion the State Department shelled out for “global health programs” in fiscal 2025, according to data from USASpending.gov, is actually controlled by the Pentagon. (The money, as I point out in my book Base Nation, is used for military intelligence gathering and gaining strategic access to locations around the world.) Sometimes it’s smaller sums, like the $385 million the Justice Department shelled out that fiscal year to settle old Vietnam War claims and compensate people harmed by radiation from nuclear weapons testing.
If the routine concealment of hundreds of billions in military spending doesn’t feel scandalous to you, imagine the uproar were the Wall Street Journal to suddenly reveal that federal officials were secretly spending almost a half-trillion beyond what Congress budgeted for Medicaid, affordable housing, education, childcare, climate programs, or food assistance. This fuzzy accounting “is not a new phenomenon. It has been a bipartisan effort spanning years,” Air Force veteran and former military budget analyst Christian Sorensen told me in an email. “When the sheer size of the figures revealed in [the] accounting sinks into public consciousness, the body politic will be even more furious.”
“The true scale of the military budget is much larger than reported,” concurs Heidi Peltier, an economist and budget expert with Brown University’s Costs of War Project. This overlooked spending raises the total, she says, by “50 percent to 130 percent higher than is usually reported, a figure likely to stun most Americans.”
“No agency on Earth could fail eight audits and still get a $1.5 trillion check, except the Pentagon.”
Quantifying miliary expenditures should be a relatively easy task for journalists and researchers. It is not. “The non-obvious costs” of what budget expert Stephen Semler, a fellow at the progressive Center for International Policy, calls “status quo” military spending are “so vast that it’s difficult to take [their] measure,” he told me.
The POGO report details how military expenditures are spread across a host of federal departments beyond the Pentagon. And how, taken together, those amounts may exceed the total of what those agencies receive for nonmilitary purposes. This is not the result of some single diabolical plan, but rather the product of obscure bureaucratic processes wherein the Pentagon, over time, has taken control of money Congress appropriates to other agencies, as a Senate Budget Committee staffer told me on condition of anonymity. While lawmakers’ actions and motivations in some cases may demand further investigation, their collective complacency has allowed the military to claim a significantly larger share of the federal budget than the public is aware of.
Using five methodologies and data from three government sources, we calculated how much money the government really spent on the military. For fiscal 2025, depending on the methodology used and how one defines military spending, that number ranged from $1.5 trillion to $2.3 trillion. For example, most of the $33.5 billion in nuclear weapons spending tracked by USASpending.gov was tucked into the Department of Energy budget. And most of the $393.3 billion cost of military pensions, veterans’ benefits, and related retirement expenditures were found on the ledger of the Department of Veterans Affairs, thus relieving the Pentagon of a substantial long-term expense. The USASpending.gov data allowed us to identify billions more in the budgets of at least 15 other agencies, expenses that don’t make it into commonly reported military spending totals.
“No agency on Earth could fail eight audits and still get a $1.5 trillion check, except the Pentagon,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee from San Diego, which has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of military personnel, said in a statement. And without the accounting to prove the money is properly spent, she added, “we shouldn’t keep footing a bill that gets bigger every year.”
The chart below is based on one of the methodologies described in POGO report. These figures reflect actual dollars spent that fiscal year, including funds Congress appropriated in prior years for multiyear programs.
Even our estimates are likely undercounts, thanks to spotty federal budget transparency, classified funding, and Pentagon accounting failures. Indeed, the Department of Defense remains the only federal agency, as Jacobs noted, that has never passed a financial audit.
We taxpayers don’t get to choose everything our money is used for, and that’s part of the grand bargain. Progressives would rather not see their tax dollars supporting Trump’s deportation machine. And plenty of conservatives would repeal the Affordable Care Act tomorrow if they could. But even as we bicker over priorities, whatever our politics, an accurate accounting of where our money goes is indispensable to an honest debate.
“Federal lawmakers would be wise to read the tea leaves, analyze the numbers, and pursue a sound, moral budget before it’s too late.”
That’s where Congress comes in. Lawmakers could stop putting military spending in budgets beyond that of the “Department of War.” They could also, for example, order the Congressional Research Service to compile an annual “total military” roundup that details everything in one place. Until that time, journalists and analysts might want to include a large asterisk whenever they cite the Pentagon’s official numbers.
The concealment of our true military budget, wittingly or unwittingly—as many members of Congress may not even realize this subterfuge is happening—shows just how out of control Pentagon spending has become, and how wildly disproportionate it is to the military threats we face. Because the reality is, we’re not merely spending more on our military than the five runners-up, but likely more than every other nation on Earth combined.
Why does this matter? Several reasons. Trump and his “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth have purged military leaders who put the Constitution first and stacked the Pentagon with loyalists. The president has dispatched National Guard troops to US cities and hasn’t ruled out ordering them to the polls during the elections, which would be in clear defiance of the Constitution. For people around the world, US military spending is a life and death matter, given the debacle in Iran—which Trump recently threatened to annihilate—and the president’s periodic threats to wage war on Cuba, Greenland, and Colombia, despite campaign promises that he would be the president who didn’t get the United States embroiled in foreign conflicts.
Put bluntly, a larger military budget means more war. It also means a bigger deficit, which pressures Congress to further slash funding for health care, Social Security, climate resilience, food safety, and all manner of domestic programs people depend upon. If Congress gave Trump what he asked for, our military spending would gobble up some 75 percent of discretionary federal funds.
In this light, his budget request should be treated as the sick joke that it is—an opportunity for the people and their representatives to insist on a different path.
Democrats and even some Republicans who claim to be concerned about our $40 trillion-plus national debt, have so far resisted Trump’s request for a Pentagon bump. In early September, the president signed a bill that extends current military funding levels into December. Both chambers of Congress are now in recess until after the midterms, so the matter may not even be resolved until after new members are seated in January 2027.
In the meantime, “federal lawmakers would be wise to read the tea leaves, analyze the numbers, and pursue a sound, moral budget before it’s too late,” Sorensen said.
That would mean reining in runaway military spending before laying a finger on the domestic programs that already help accomplish what should be the US military’s most fundamental purpose: keeping Americans alive and well.
