“Trump plans on liquidating Medicaid and SNAP advantages whereas giving the Pentagon a trillion {dollars},” wrote one critic.
President Donald Trump on Monday publicly backed an annual price range of roughly $1 trillion for the U.S. army as his administration rushed forward with a harmful tariff scheme that quantities to a major tax increase on American households, with working-class families set to bear a lot of the ache.
Chatting with reporters on the White Home throughout a sit-down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump stated his administration has signed off on an upcoming army price range within the neighborhood of $1 trillion, which might be a report sum. The army price range for the present fiscal yr is $892 billion, greater than half of the federal authorities’s discretionary price range.
“No one’s seen something prefer it,” Trump stated Monday of his $1 trillion price range proposal.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth later chimed in on social media, voicing enthusiastic help for a $1 trillion army price range and vowing to spend these {dollars} “on lethality and readiness.”
Watch Trump’s feedback:
Thanks Mr. President!
COMING SOON: the primary TRILLION greenback @DeptofDefense price range.
President @realDonaldTrump is rebuilding our army — and FAST.
(PS: we intend to spend each taxpayer greenback properly — on lethality and readiness) pic.twitter.com/WcZlNAHgDG
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) April 7, 2025
William Hartung, senior analysis fellow on the Quincy Institute for Accountable Statecraft, warned in a press release Tuesday that “spending $1 trillion on the Pentagon whereas hollowing out sources for diplomacy and launching a worldwide commerce struggle is a recipe for worldwide battle and American decline.”
“The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ought to have taught us {that a} military-first strategy to international coverage is each ineffective and immensely pricey in blood and treasure,” stated Hartung. “As for coping with the problem posed by China, we want a extra balanced strategy that mixes diplomacy with deterrence and retains open the choice for dialogue and cooperation on pressing points like local weather change, pandemics, and the perilous state of the worldwide financial system.”
“Pursuing a trillion-dollar Pentagon price range on the expense of different priorities,” he added, “can be a trillion-dollar blunder.”
Trump and Hegseth’s remarks point out that the Pentagon — lengthy a hotbed of waste and egregious abuse of taxpayer cash, largely for the good thing about private contractors — will possible stay insulated from the Elon Musk-led effort to dismantle federal businesses underneath the guise of boosting authorities effectivity.
In February, Hegseth authored a memo instructing Pentagon leaders to attract up plans to cut back the army price range in every of the following 5 years. But it surely quickly grew to become clear that the Pentagon management is pushing to divert funds to Trump priorities — together with his proposed Iron Dome for America boondoggle — reasonably than scale back total spending.
Below Democratic and Republican presidents, and with overwhelming bipartisan help in Congress, the U.S. army price range has been steadily racing towards the $1 trillion mark yr after yr, regardless of the Pentagon’s inability to pass an audit and mounting proof of large-scale fraud and misuse of taxpayer cash.
Trump’s price range proposal must be authorized by the Republican-controlled Congress, which is currently working — with the president’s help — to additional slash taxes for the wealthy and enormous companies and lower Medicare, meals support, and different federal help packages.
“Trump plans on liquidating Medicaid and SNAP advantages whereas giving the Pentagon a trillion {dollars},” wrote Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Safety Coverage Reform Institute. “If the Democrats can’t make a coherent political message out of those primary info, they’re not an opposition social gathering, or perhaps a social gathering.”
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