Two years ago, the Biden Administration requested roughly $850 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget. In this year’s request, if you include the Pentagon’s reported request for a $200 billion Iran war supplemental, which the White House has yet to formally submit to Congress, and a request for $350 billion through reconciliation, it’s now seeking double that amount—some $1.7 trillion.
Here’s the topline breakdown, sourced from the White House’s detailed function tables, which outline budget authority and outlays by function (totals may not add due to rounding):
Full-length books, if not encyclopedias, could be written about the problems with this Pentagon budget request. The biggest problem is the behemoth scale of this request, which is matched with the paucity of detail on it. Based on what Congress enacted through regular appropriations, and the Pentagon’s spending plan for One Big Beautiful Budget Act (OBBBA) dollars, this $1.54 trillion request represents a 45 percent increase over FY26 enacted national security spending of about $1.06 trillion, and a 52.5 percent increase over the $1.01 trillion FY26 request. For context, adjusted for inflation, the Pentagon budget grew by about 50 percent over the first 25 years of this century.
What would enacting this request mean for long-term national security spending? That depends on the extent to which it becomes a new baseline. According to the request’s ten-year spending plan, this budget envisions a significant increase in discretionary Pentagon spending next year to $1.23 trillion, and smaller but steady increases over the following three years, after which it holds steady at $1.3 trillion through 2036. Looking at national security spending overall, the ten-year plan envisions spending $13.95 trillion over the next decade, for an average of almost $1.4 trillion per year.
In the detailed funding tables for the FY25 budget, the Biden Administration at the time had planned on spending $8.1 trillion on national security from FY27 through FY34, for an average of $1.02 trillion per year. This budget plans to spend $11.15 trillion over that period, for an average of $1.39 trillion per year. That’s a 36 percent increase in projected national security spending over the next 8 years, or over $3 trillion more than the previous administration’s anticipated spending.
Aside from its obscene size and long-term fiscal impacts, one of the biggest lowlights is that it doubles down on funding major portions of the Pentagon budget through reconciliation—setting up another unaccountable slush fund after the Pentagon failed to follow congressional guidance on the first $152 billion of Pentagon spending through reconciliation.
Stepping back from the absurd numbers and horrible process, this budget represents national security spending bereft of any coherent strategy. We need a national security budget that recognizes the importance of prioritization and fiscal discipline. Adding trillions of dollars to the debt as this spending plan envisions will deepen the nation’s fiscal crisis and make it harder to budget for national security in the long run. It will lead to spending on a long list of wasteful, unnecessary, and unworkable programs like the Sentinel ICBM, the Golden Dome, and the Golden Fleet. When everything is a priority, nothing’s a priority.
In order to truly hit the brakes on this runaway train of Pentagon waste, Congress must not only reject any increase for the Pentagon this year—it must pursue targeted cuts within the existing budget to wasteful programs and practices, which would free up funds for real priorities at the Pentagon and beyond. National security demands nothing less.
