“I rebuilt the military in my first term and continue to do so today. We have a budget of $1.5 trillion,” claimed President Donald Trump in a provocative, meandering, and at times outright baffling speech at the Davos Economic Forum today.
While fact-checkers eviscerated scores of Trump’s misleading statements in the speech, this $1.5 trillion military budget claim went largely uncontested. Yet, this would seemingly have been one of the easiest myths to debunk. After all, the Pentagon currently has a trillion dollar budget (wow, someone should really write a book about that!) and it was just two weeks ago that Trump announced, via Truth Social post, that he’d be seeking (read: did not currently have) a $1.5 trillion military budget.
Critics, myself included, pointed out the enormous amount of taxpayer money this would waste, while doing little, if anything, to make the average American any safer. At the very least, it would contribute $5.8 trillion over the next ten years to the already skyrocketing U.S. national debt, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
But, there’s another way of looking at the numbers, and, from this point-of-view, Trump is absolutely right — the U.S. is already spending more than $1.5 trillion on defense. The fact is that most Americans —and even most foreign policy wonks — grossly undercount the amount of money our government spends on the national security state. This is precisely what some of the most ardent critics of wasteful U.S. military spending have been arguing for years.
For example in 2024, Winslow Wheeler, who previously analyzed the budget process for both parties in the Senate and at the Government Accountability Office, put the “real” national security budget closer to $2 trillion dollars, when including things like veterans care and defense spending’s impact on the national debt. By a similar accounting, the Institute for Policy Studies found that nearly two-thirds of the entire federal government’s discretionary budget — which doesn’t include big-ticket items like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid — is spent on militarism and war.
Using today’s budget figures and this more accurate accounting of “defense” spending, it’s very easy to prove Trump right. Outside of the trillion dollar defense budget, even if you only add in what we spent in 2025 on clearly national security focused agencies — like the Department of Veterans Affairs ($401 billion), the Department of Homeland Security ($111 billion), and the Director of National Intelligence ($73 billion) — you arrive at a nearly $1.6 trillion budget for U.S. national security.
So, Mr. President, you were right — the U.S. already has a national security budget well above $1.5 trillion dollars. Congratulations! Now there is no need to give any additional taxpayer dollars to a Pentagon bureaucracy that has never once passed a full financial audit, right?...Right?- Pentagon can't account for 63% of nearly $4 trillion in assets ›
- The reality of Trump’s cartoonish $1.5 trillion DOD budget proposal ›
