In its latest budget request, the Trump administration has asked Congress for an unprecedented $1.45 trillion Pentagon budget (plus about $50 billion for other defense activities). This is both the largest inflation-adjusted dollar amount in history and the largest one-year increase (some $420 billion, in fiscal year 2027 dollars) since the Korean War.* President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post that this amount is necessary to build a “Dream Military” and keep the United States “SAFE and SECURE.” In fact, the request would impose a staggering bill on American taxpayers; is completely disconnected from a coherent defense strategy, realistic threat assessment, or trade-off analysis; and includes the obvious potential for multibillion-dollar waste. Providing for America’s defense and ensuring the readiness of its armed forces is essential—and requires a clear defense strategy that both prioritizes capabilities suited for the 21st century and ensures they are resourced through disciplined, accountable spending. Simply throwing enormous amounts of money at the problem of national security obscures the hard, strategic choices the Department of Defense needs to make to keep the country safe; it does not mean these strategic choices will disappear.
A budget without a strategy
The defense budget should provide the necessary resources to achieve a national security strategy suited to defending the nation in the modern era. So what would a smart defense budget look like?
First, an effective national security strategy and defense budget would recognize how new realities of warfare, alongside new domains of geo-economic competition, are reshaping defense needs just as much as the enduring threat from a near-peer military competitor such as the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It must recognize the ways in which technology is rapidly changing warfare, rendering old platforms and systems obsolete, and fund deterrence and resilience in this new threat environment. Perhaps most importantly, it should recognize that there are serious and increasingly unforgiving limits as to when and where military force can be used to effectively solve security challenges and design a budget in which defense is nested alongside other, fully resourced elements of national power.
The recent wars in Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated how cheap, easily expendable systems impose real costs on advanced platforms. As Russia discovered in Ukraine and, more recently, the United States with Iran, deploying exquisite weapons does not guarantee strategic or, sometimes, even tactical, success. Over the past several months, President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have deployed some of the world’s most advanced aircraft and sophisticated, precision-guided munitions, fetishizing the lethality and spectacle of these weapons in combat. Yet the United States still suffered significant equipment losses against low-technology Iranian drones and discovered that expensive military hardware alone does not translate into victory or an ability for the nation to impose its strategic will. While these adversaries may not approximate the threat that a competitor such as China poses, they do demonstrate rapid and fundamental changes in 21st century warfare, changes that should guide defense strategy and budgets.
A smart defense budget also requires continued investments in the readiness of America’s armed forces, including quality pay, better housing, and other quality-of-life improvements for service members. It is essential that it resources a dynamic industrial base—one that can rapidly meet evolving needs and is not reliant on single points of failure with a few prime contractors. And lastly, it should be aligned with carefully managed efforts to share the burden of defense worldwide with partners and allies.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s budget request fails to accomplish this.
Even where it recognizes threats and needs—such as the military threat from China or deficiencies in the defense industrial base—it fails to effectively prioritize these or match action to intent. For instance, the Trump administration gestures to burden-sharing as an imperative to make alliances more effective and reduce strain on U.S. military resources, but, in practice, it has employed coercion and strained alliances with NATO, Japan, Korea, and Australia, with the net effect shifting the cost of defense onto the American taxpayer. While the Trump administration’s budget request includes increases in spending on drones—including a near 24,000 percent increase in the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, formerly known as the Replicator initiative—interceptors, and munitions replenishment, it also requests billions of dollars for legacy big-ticket items that reflect the president’s personal priorities but not the realities of warfare today.
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Billions of dollars for outdated projects that invite waste
The budget requests $17.5 billion for the Golden Dome, a multilayered missile defense shield. In a nod to the Israeli “Iron Dome,” President Trump has made this system a personal priority. However, the concept faces serious physical, technological, and budgetary challenges and is unlikely ever to be fully operational. Similarly, the request includes $1.8 billion in funds for design and development of the “Trump-class” battleship, a new, expensive battleship class that makes little strategic sense for the Navy—and that is unlikely ever to see the light of day given the costs and the need to utilize industrial capacity to produce platforms that meet actual needs. The request also includes $9 billion for the F-47, a hyper-expensive U.S. Air Force sixth-generation fighter that the Trump administration moved quickly to advance, while failing to prioritize the counter-space capabilities and air base defense required to ensure its viability. The F-47 program also competes for industrial capacity with more relevant modernization needs, repeating a pattern of resource competition that plagued the F-35 program. Taken together, these requests raise the potential for billions in taxpayer dollars spent on contracts without demonstrated defense value, an environment ripe for waste and abuse.
A fiscally irresponsible budget
The administration’s Pentagon budget not only makes little strategic sense, but it also represents fiscal irresponsibility at a moment when the United States faces a historic budget deficit and, thanks to the Trump administration’s mismanagement of the economy and massive tax cuts for America’s wealthiest, rapidly rising costs to borrow. The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) most recent long-term budget projections showed primary (or noninterest) deficits hovering at historic highs outside of war and recession for the next three decades straight. In an April congressional hearing, CBO Director Phillip Swagel confirmed that the $1.45 trillion request would increase the deficit “above the baseline by the $500 billion plus the interest costs for the year,” bringing the annual deficit to $2.5 trillion if enacted. This deficit increase would come as the U.S. national debt has surpassed gross domestic product (GDP) for the first time since World War II and as the United States now spends more on debt service than it does on defense.
In short, there is no sound defense rationale for a Pentagon budget so large that it worsens the already unsustainable fiscal trajectory (itself a national security issue), nor for pairing deep austerity measures that cut into America’s ability to sustain world-class research leadership or invest in infrastructure essential for defense industrial leadership with major increases in defense spending. More disciplined spending can still meet defense needs while protecting key sources of American strength—including the world’s largest and most dependable market economy, high-tech innovation, and a healthy, well-educated public.
Smarter defense spending
Instead of an “all of the above” defense budget, the unifying logic of a disciplined approach to defense should focus on applying new technology in cost-effective programs and operational concepts, including expanding magazine depth, long-range power projection, and strategic deterrence—things that are essential for a range of contingencies and can survive contact with a peer adversary, where the current military structure faces genuine need. That includes building out easily expendable autonomy, such as cheap and mass-produced Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA)-type drones, uncrewed surface and underwater ships, uncrewed weapons systems (LRASM, JASSM-ER, SM-6, Tomahawk, PrSM, and LCCMs), theater missile capacity, and the production capacity behind these. A smart defense budget should include funding to expand the submarine industrial base. It should invest in resilient command and control (C2) and space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), communications, and robust counter-space systems to create the connective tissue that leverages other investments and denies adversaries the ability to target from space. Likewise, a smart approach to defense needs to properly resource modernizing the nuclear triad given the new realities of the PRC executing an aggressive nuclear breakout, Russia’s use of nuclear-capable missiles in Ukraine, the potential for a nuclear proliferation cascade flowing from Trump’s failed Iran war, evolving allied extended deterrence architecture, and the emergent requirements for cross-domain deterrence—and all with rigorous congressional oversight, including to address the cost and delivery challenges that have plagued the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program. Finally, smart defense spending must address the sustainment and readiness backlogs that Trump’s war of choice in Iran has exposed and that leave Americans less safe.
While the United States certainly needs to spend more in some areas, a disciplined approach to the defense budget can find savings in other areas without sacrificing national security—both by learning from recent conflicts and by focusing more on genuine, sensible burden-sharing. For instance, Congress could accommodate increases in the programs described above without even nearing a $1.45 trillion budget topline—and ensure an industrial base more capable of delivery—through a more disciplined allocation. A military budget serious about defense as opposed to ostentatious displays could allocate Golden Dome, F-47, and battleship dollars for resilient space and counter-space systems and magazine depth, as well as incentivize a refocused defense industrial base by investing in game-changing uncrewed air, ground, surface, and undersea drones.
Congress should not authorize the Trump administration’s budget topline
The Trump administration faces an uphill battle in securing the full $1.45 trillion Pentagon budget, as it looks to Congress to authorize $1.1 trillion for the Pentagon in the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as well as to pass another $350 billion through a reconciliation process. Congress should make clear that this request is not business as usual: Even the president’s base discretionary request of $1.1 trillion represents a staggering 28 percent increase over the base for FY 2026—a more than $225 billion real increase.** While the recently released chairman’s mark of the NDAA does moderate some aspects of the budget—such as introducing guardrails on the “Trump-class” battleship program—it does not go nearly far enough. Congress should refuse to authorize the president’s unjustifiable increase request. Instead, lawmakers should insist on a disciplined defense budget that makes sense, ensuring that funds are spent on programs critical for the well-being of American service members and modern defense needs—not vanity projects with limited military utility.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Frank Kendall, CAP senior fellow and former secretary of the Air Force, for his expert review and contributions to this article. They would also like to thank Bobby Kogan, CAP senior director, for his expert review and assistance with budget analysis, and Michael Clark for his assistance with fact-checking.
* Calculations from the Center for American Progress. The $1.45 trillion figure combines the administration’s $1.1 trillion base discretionary request for the Department of Defense with $350 billion in proposed reconciliation spending. In addition, the administration’s request includes about $50 billion for Department of Energy and other defense activities. The characterization of this as the largest one-year increase for the Department of Defense since the Korean War refers to the year-over-year percentage increase in budget authority (approximately 44 percent over FY 2026 enacted levels, including base and reconciliation funding), as well as the total value of the increase in inflation-adjusted (FY 2027) dollars ($420 billion)—using historical defense spending data from the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Defense.
** Calculations from CAP. The NDAA may authorize funds above the $1.1 trillion figure, as it authorizes defense-related programs outside of the Department of Defense; the $1.1 trillion figure represents Department of Defense funding only.