By Anthony Iafrate
President Donald Trump’s administration has not finalized how to allocate the more than half-trillion-dollar increase in U.S. military spending outlined in the White House’s proposed budget, according to The Washington Post.
Trump in January had approved Department of War (DoW) Secretary Pete Hegseth’s request to increase defense spending to $1.5 trillion in Fiscal Year 2027, up from the previous year’s $900 billion, a record at the time. This move, however, was opposed by several members of the administration, including Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought, who is widely considered to be a deficit hawk, the outlet reported Saturday, citing four anonymous sources. (RELATED: US Army Takes Cue From Wall Street For Officer Bonuses)
White House and Pentagon staff are reportedly encountering logistical obstacles in determining how to distribute the more than 50% increase in the military budget from FY2026 to FY2027 due to its sheer magnitude, sources told the outlet. They added that, because of this, the White House is over two weeks behind schedule in submitting its proposed budget for congressional consideration.
Retired Marine Corps Col. Mark Cancian told The Washington Post that it is a “head-scratcher” that Hegseth’s Pentagon requested such a drastic budget increase while expressing the desire to deprioritize the U.S.’s military presence outside the Western Hemisphere.
“If you’ve got a 50 percent budget increase, you don’t have to do any of that. You’d be talking about all the new places you’d making investments,” added Cancian, who is now a senior adviser at Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan foreign policy think tank.
The White House’s proposed $1.5 trillion FY2027 defense budget dwarfs a Democratic Party Medicare expansion program, which has an estimated price tag of just $350 billion, The Washington Post reported.
The Pentagon 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. That’s 61% of military assets.
The Pentagon can make do with less: a think-tank identified $17-20 billion in readily-achievable savings to the 2013 military budget.
A Washington Post article says a huge amount of wasteful spending could be cut from the defense budget, but hasn’t. A commission once proposed cutting about $75 billion per year in defense spending.
Hegseth promoted the proposed over 50% increase in the U.S.’s military budget while speaking to Lockheed Martin employees in January, The Hill reported at the time. Lockheed Martin is the leading defense contractor.
