Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently asked Congress for a staggering amount of money: $1.5 trillion. That’s a more than 40 percent increase from last year’s also incomprehensible Pentagon budget and the equivalent of the annual revenues of Amazon, Google’s parent company and Apple combined.
Technically, officially, Mr. Hegseth’s $1.5 trillion was a budget request, and it had thousands of pages of figures and line items to go with it. But what’s even more astonishing than its size is that it wasn’t really a budget, not in the way you or I would think of it.
The word “budget” ordinarily implies picking among options, living within your means. Earlier military budgets, even the most gigantic ones, made trade-offs — canceled weapons programs, deferred maintenance, smaller fighting forces, to name a few. Mr. Hegseth’s plan avoids those choices almost entirely.
It would funnel more money to the traditional military contractors that Mr. Hegseth previously called out for feasting on a wasteful, bloated system. It would bankroll President Trump’s weirdly retro military wish list. On top of all that, Mr. Hegseth has asked Congress for $350 billion that would come with far less oversight or accountability than the rest of the sum. And that’s before the bill for the Iran war comes due; the Pentagon estimates it has cost $29 billion so far, up from an estimate of $25 billion a few weeks ago.
“They’re just doing an all-of-the-above approach,” says Todd Harrison, a military budget expert at the traditionally right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, so that they “don’t have to make difficult choices.”
That makes Mr. Hegseth’s funding request less like a budget and more like a trip to an endless casino buffet. You don’t have to pick which entree you want or decide among desserts. You can have them all and in gut-busting proportions.
Mr. Trump announced the $1.5 trillion figure in January, on social media. “This will allow us to build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to,” he wrote. According to The Washington Post, it wasn’t part of some carefully considered budget-building exercise; it was more like a dare, one of those Trumpy attempts to reframe the debate on his own maximalist terms. White House aides and military officials reportedly scrambled to find projects that could fit the inflated number.
“To me, it feels like that number was just kind of pulled out of thin air,” Senator Mark Kelly, the former Navy pilot and frequent Hegseth foil, said archly during the defense secretary’s testimony.
Mr. Hegseth responded that “the exact amount is actually $1.535 trillion, and it was a product of a highly rigorous process throughout our department.” He added that “every budgetary item we request serves to ensure the department remains laser focused on increasing lethality and survivability of our forces, from the front lines to the factory floors.”
That rigor is awfully hard to detect in the budget documents Mr. Hegseth presented to Congress. There’s $20 billion to provide “strategic capital” to selected companies; one that has already benefited from loans is linked to the venture capital firm 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. There’s a $23 billion kitty to spend on things like battery components and other “critical capabilities required by the war fighter.” A separate $46 billion “sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure” fund would be used to, among other things, buy up high-end chips, build data centers “inside and outside the continental U.S.” and provide “strategic investment” in private companies.
Mr. Hegseth’s team says it needs flexibility in order to keep up with the head-snapping pace of change in technology but promises the budget will be “fiscally responsible.” Angus King, the usually hawkish independent senator from Maine, said that a quarter of the budget was “essentially a slush fund.” It’s a giant blank check with “Trust me” penciled in. So let me ask you: How much do you trust Pete Hegseth?
Only a year before, Mr. Hegseth was part of an administrationwide push to cut programs in the name of government efficiency. He was praised in military circles for trimming regulations, streamlining the Pentagon’s arcane purchasing protocols and encouraging new, nimbler companies to challenge the security state’s dinosaurs. One especially promising program takes the form of a series of contests: Whichever companies fly the best small, low-cost drones win Pentagon contracts to build thousands of the things. It happens in the open; you can see the leaderboard for yourself. A British-Ukrainian partnership is beating out more politically connected rivals, proving yet again that in this new age of war, it’s not always the priciest weapons that win.
At the other end of the spectrum, in every way imaginable, is Lockheed Martin’s $2 trillion F-35 program; Mr. Hegseth’s proposal looks to spend $21 billion on it next year, though roughly half the time, the stealth fighters are not available to fly their missions. The proposal would continue to pour billions into Northrop Grumman’s Sentinel ICBM upgrade program, despite costs ballooning by more than 81 percent from the original budget and a deployment schedule that’s slipping into the 2030s. And it would spend billions in munitions for Raytheon’s Patriot missile system, never mind the enormous inefficiency of shooting $4 million interceptors at $35,000 Iranian drones.
The president’s pet projects would get enormous infusions of cash, too. The budget would allow the Navy to get going on a new class of battleships, the first since World War II, notwithstanding the increasing vulnerability of such vessels to long-range missiles and fast-moving attacks. (The secretary of the Navy, you may recall, was recently ousted in part because of a disagreement over these ships.)
Mr. Trump’s prized Golden Dome missile defense program — a reboot of the Reagan-era “Star Wars” effort — has already received billions of dollars, including a contract for SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company. The new budget request would route nearly $18 billion to Golden Dome.
The Pentagon’s concerns are real, especially when it comes to keeping up with emerging technologies, and each of these efforts will have its champions in the military, in Congress or in the military industry. But picking all of these pricey programs at once is no choice at all.
“You name it, we’re investing in it,” Mr. Hegseth told senators last month.
While Mr. Hegseth is looking to supersize military spending, he and the Trump administration have taken all sorts of steps to minimize accountability. One of their early actions was to fire and replace the Pentagon’s inspector general, whose office looks into claims of fraud and abuse in military contracting. The independent office that tests whether our weapons actually work has been gutted. At Mr. Hegseth’s direction and occasional encouragement, thousands of civil servants, many of whom were responsible for keeping the military’s spending in check, have walked out the Pentagon’s doors.
Last year about $150 billion in military spending was marked as so-called mandatory expenditures. That designation means they’re subject to less congressional oversight, lower vote thresholds to clear the Senate and longer timelines in which to spend the money. This year’s budget request would roughly double that total, to $350 billion. That is more than the budgets of the Departments of Energy, Justice, Labor and Health and Human Services put together.
This year’s ask also covers major increases for several secret items. That includes an extra $10 billion more than last year for the Air Force’s classified research and development funding, and another $10 billion jump for the Space Force’s. It also includes huge sums for things that are not officially marked as classified, including a $54 billion program for autonomous warfare, but which are cloaked in a degree of secrecy, stating, “additional information is available at a higher classification.”
That secrecy, and that price tag, might make you suspicious of the spending. Mr. Hegseth assured Congress it’s all on the level. He testified last month that the $54 billion autonomous warfare program was critical. Then he paused. “Jay” — Jay Hurst, the Pentagon comptroller — “just slid me a piece of paper,” Mr. Hegseth continued. “If you add it all up, it could be closer to $74 billion.”
When you’re spending this much, what’s $20 billion one way or the other?
Noah Shachtman, a contributing Opinion writer, is a longtime national security reporter.
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