Federal Spending Is Only Going Up: Trump Pushes Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget
President Donald Trump last week announced new plans for a $1 trillion defense budget in 2026. Trump bragged about his big plans for spending ever larger amounts of taxpayer funds, stating at a meeting with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu that “We’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military … $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.” An increase in military spending to $1 trillion is a funding increase of more than $100 billion, or 12 percent. It would be the largest single-year increase since 2004, during the early years of the Iraq war.
Trump made no mention of earlier claims that his administration would cut overall federal spending while cutting the federal government’s annual deficit.
It’s easy to see why he wouldn’t mention those earlier promises. In recent days, Elon Musk has backtracked on his earlier promises that the Department of Government Efficiency would cut $1 trillion in federal spending in the near future. The new figure offered by Musk is only fifteen percent of that, or $150 billion. In other words, when it comes to spending, DOGE’s “savings” amount to about 2.2 percent of federal spending.
Things aren’t looking good for anyone who actually believed the administration’s promises to cut overall federal spending.
Assuming that DOGE actually delivers $150 billion worth of cuts to federal spending, and assuming that the Trump administration uses DOGE cuts to offset military spending, that means every other category of federal spending could increase only $50 billion overall if the goal is a cut to federal spending. Moreover, even if federal spending is cut by, say, $50 billion, that still leaves a federal deficit of nearly $2 trillion.
After all, the Trump administration has promised to not touch Social Security and Medicare, which make up forty percent of federal spending all by themselves. Given the nature of those two nondiscretionary programs, we can be sure that they will only increase in coming years.
Moreover, there is nothing in any of the new budgets approved by Trump and the GOP Congress to suggest that overall federal spending will decrease in coming years. Yes, the GOP promises to cut spending “over ten
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
