America’s federal budget deficit was a massive $1.809 trillion in 2025. That’s bigger than the budget deficit of any other nation on Earth. Yet President Trump wants to increase Pentagon spending by $500 billion next year, which would push the deficit well over $2 trillion in future years. That would result in the national debt — which is already 24% bigger than our economy — growing steadily faster than the economy, year after year. That steady growth in the national debt would eventually bankrupt America.
Countries are supposed to run balanced budgets except during recessions — the opposite of what America is doing now, with its big budget deficits. Many economists say countries should run surpluses during periods of economic growth like today. Those surpluses are needed to offset the deficits countries run up during bad times. “Keynesian economics theory suggests that entities should run a surplus during times of prosperity and a deficit during a downcycle or depression. This allows the company or government to save money when it is well off and to spend money on economic stimulus when the economy is less well off.”
Yet, Trump wants to radically increase America’s defense spending, which is already much bigger than the defense spending of any other nation on Earth. America spends more on defense than China and Russia combined — more than twice as much as they do together:
President Donald Trump on Wednesday declared he would ask Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget in 2027, a massive $500 billion increase from this year’s Pentagon budget.
The huge boost likely reflects how expensive some of Trump’s military ambitions are, from the Golden Dome air defense effort to his call for a new battleship design. Neither of those programs could be fully funded under current spending levels.
The president provided few details in his post on Truth Social, other than to say the money would pay for his “Dream Military.” Trump did suggest that tariff revenues could cover the increase, but even if he managed to circumvent Congress’ constitutionally mandated power over spending, existing tariff collections would still be several hundred billion short of what the president plans to ask for.
While finding half-a-trillion dollars in new spending would prove difficult, Trump and some congressional Republicans appeared confident they could do so. The budget reached $1 trillion this year thanks to $150 billion in new money Congress voted to pour into Pentagon coffers via a reconciliation bill, although much of that will be spread out over the next five years on various long-term projects.
Lawmakers have yet to complete a defense spending bill for this fiscal year, although a final agreement is expected to increase Trump’s budget request by several billion dollars.
The Pentagon already wastes enormous amounts of money. The Pentagon loses track of many valuable assets, and has failed audit after audit: it failed to track $2.1 trillion in assets in 2022 — 61% of military assets!
The Pentagon can make do with less: the Cato Institute identified $17-20 billion in readily-achievable savings to the 2013 military budget.
As Fareed Zakaria noted in 2011 in the Washington Post, a huge amount of wasteful spending could be cut from the defense budget, but hasn’t:
The Bowles-Simpson commission’s plan proposed $750 billion in defense cuts over 10 years. Lawrence Korb, who worked at the Pentagon for Ronald Reagan, believes that a $1 trillion cut over 10 to 12 years is feasible without compromising national security.
Serious conservatives should examine the defense budget … [which includes] a cradle-to-grave system of housing, subsidies, cost-plus procurement, early retirement and lifetime pension and health-care guarantees. There is so much overlap among the military services, so much duplication and so much waste that no one bothers to defend it anymore. Today, the U.S. defense establishment is the world’s largest socialist economy.
Zakaria quoted former defense secretary Robert Gates observing that there were “more members of military marching bands than make up the entire U.S. foreign service.”
