President Trump proposed on Wednesday increasing military spending next year by more than half, raising the defense budget in 2027 to $1.5 trillion as he pushes for American imperialism in Venezuela and beyond.
“Our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars,” Trump wrote on social media. “This will allow us to build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe.”
The president’s request for a $600 billion increase in military spending comes as his administration flexes military strength around the world. In just the last week, Mr. Trump has vowed to exploit Venezuela’s vast oil reserves under threat of a military blockade, and has threatened to forcibly annex Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, a NATO military ally. In his announcement Wednesday, Mr. Trump characterized the state of the world as “very dangerous and troubled times.”
It is unclear from Mr. Trump’s announcement which weapons programs and branches of the military would benefit from the increased spending. But in recent days the president and his advisers have outlined a vision for a new world order in which the United States may freely overthrow national governments and take foreign territory and resources so long as the actions were deemed in the national interest.
Mr. Trump justified the huge proposed increase in military spending by claiming, falsely, that it could be paid entirely through tariff revenue. By the government’s estimates, the United States collected more than $200 billion in tariff revenue in 2025, and Mr. Trump has already promised to return that revenue to Americans who have been hurt by the tariffs, including to farmers in the form of relief payments and to citizens more generally in the form of $2,000 rebate checks. (One nonpartisan group estimated the rebate checks would cost $600 billion a year.)
Mr. Trump had proposed about $1 trillion for military spending last year. Republican lawmakers, in a rare act of defiance, criticized that plan for spending too little on the armed forces.
Even so, the president insisted on Wednesday that he would have raised military spending by only about another $100 billion next year, to a total of $1 trillion, were it not for the large amounts of revenue being raised from tariffs. Mr. Trump also reiterated his promise to hand out dividend checks to “moderate income Patriots” from tariff revenue.
In what appeared to be a move to head off criticism for funneling even more taxpayer dollars to the military-industrial complex, Mr. Trump said that he would attempt to limit pay for executives at defense companies that take contracts with the U.S. military to $5 million a year. He also said he would move to ban stock buybacks and the issuing of dividends for those companies.
It is unclear how those rules could be enforced, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for details. An executive order signed by Mr. Trump on Wednesday did not cap executive salaries, or explicitly ban stock buybacks or the issuing of dividends. Instead, it focused mostly on reviewing defense contractors that the administration considered underperforming.
Mr. Trump turned his ire toward Raytheon, a company that makes many of the missiles and bombs supplied to the U.S. military and its allies, claiming that it had been “the least responsive to the needs” of the American military. The president threatened to cancel contracts with Raytheon if it did not follow his directives to increase production and limit compensation for executives and stockholders.
In 2009, Congress and the Obama administration sought to set pay limits for executives in the law that bailed out banks after the financial crisis. But in practice, that law had only a marginal effect on executive compensation at companies that accepted the bailout. On Wednesday, stock prices for defense companies dipped slightly before trading stopped at 4 p.m. Mr. Trump’s announcement of the $1.5 trillion military budget came at 4:17 p.m.
In absolute terms, a $600 billion increase in military spending is an enormous rise. It is more than the entire defense budget — $582.7 billion — proposed by the Obama administration in 2016, the year before Mr. Trump’s first term began. Inflation and fluctuations in purchasing power can complicate comparisons to previous years and to rival militaries, but data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, also known as SIPRI, suggests that Mr. Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion military budget could rival American military spending during the Cold War.
China has the second-largest military budget of any country at $245 billion, though its spending goes much further than the United States’ because of factors like cheaper labor. China has hundreds of thousands more troops than the United States, for example, but pays them much lower salaries. Russia, which has a much smaller economic base and has waged a nearly four-year war in Ukraine, has an official military budget of more than $160 billion.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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