This week, the Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to mark up the National Defense Authorization Act. One option under consideration is a plan that Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) proposed to dramatically increase defense funding. The plan, which was immediately backed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) after its release in late May, calls for increasing defense funding this coming year—fiscal year 2025—to be $55 billion above the statutory budget caps, a 7 percent increase above the current funding level. Sen. Wicker’s plan calls for defense funding to then continue growing dramatically, reaching 5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) within five to seven years. This would be the largest defense funding since the fall of the Soviet Union more than 30 years ago.
New analysis by the Center for American Progress estimates that this plan would increase defense funding by $5.7 trillion to $6.3 trillion over the decade. By 2034, defense funding would be $2.1 trillion, a 90 percent increase above the $1.1 trillion in the current law baseline.* That increase is significantly larger than the $4 trillion cost over the decade of extending the Trump tax cuts.
Sen. Wicker said this approach would force the United States to “start a reckoning over our nation’s spending priorities.” Taken at his word, Sen. Wicker seems to be calling for increased defense funding at the expense of important domestic priorities. This would move the budget away from investments in people and communities. Under Sen. Wicker’s plan, even if it didn’t lead to cuts in existing programs, the United States would provide more funding for defense than it does for infrastructure, research and development, and education combined. It would appropriate more for defense than it does for economic security programs and Medicaid combined. It would give more than twice as much to defense as it does to veterans, the administration of justice, community and regional development, agriculture, and natural resources and the environment combined.
Under Sen. Wicker’s plan, even if it didn’t lead to cuts in existing programs, the United States would provide more funding for defense than it does for infrastructure, research and development, and education combined.
With $6 trillion, the United States could do all the following, combined:
- Expand access to affordable, quality child care for low- and middle-income families
- Expand access to free, universal preschool
- Fund free community college
- Double Pell Grants for students at public and nonprofit institutions
- Double Title I education for lower-income schools and students
- Provide 12 weeks of comprehensive paid family and medical leave to all workers
- Fully fund Section 8 housing
- Double federal nondefense research and development funding
- Double federal infrastructure funding
- Double federal job training programs
This increased defense funding, when combined with the cost of extending the Trump tax cuts, would total roughly $10 trillion over the decade.**
Funding the United States’ defense needs is no doubt a critical task for Congress. But bloating the defense budget does not necessarily make the United States, or its citizens, any safer. Congress should seek avenues to spend smarter, not only more, on the defense budget and preserve funds for programs in global health, development, and democracy—all of which pay dividends in addressing long-term security threats.
The nation has a duty to attend to national security. However, the United States has numerous unmet domestic needs. More than 40 million Americans are food insecure. Roughly 38 million Americans live in poverty. Tens of thousands of Americans die every year of preventable disease. When looking to reassess the nation’s budget priorities, Congress should not replace critical funding that serves the public with deeply outsize defense funding. The budget should instead seek always to center people and their needs.
The authors would like to thank Allison McManus, Jean Ross, Brendan Duke, Madeline Shepherd, Sarah Nadeau, Julia Cusick, and Emily Gee for their helpful suggestions.
Methodology
To create the comparisons used in this article, the authors have used data from the CBO’s February 2024 baseline, the president’s FY 2025 budget, the Office of Management and Budget’s Public Budget Database, and the Office of Management and Budget’s Historical Table 9.8.
* The authors used a slightly adjusted version of the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) baseline. Under the CBO’s February 2024 baseline, the defense levels are below the statutory budget caps set in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. The authors adjusted the CBO baseline to have defense funding match the defense budget cap and increased the later years commensurately. Relative to the official CBO baseline, Sen. Wicker’s plan would increase defense funding by $6.0 trillion to $6.6 trillion.
** This figure represents the new policy changes over 10 years. Roughly 7 percent of the primary deficit effect of those policy changes would lag slightly beyond the 10 years.