Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

The Pentagon’s Secret Budget

Trump’s proposed budget hides $1 trillion in military spending from the public by spreading it across disparate government agencies.

No one can tell you exactly what’s in the bloated Pentagon budget and what it costs. After all, the Defense Department has never passed an audit. Still, we know it’s larded up with terrible, lethal, wasteful expenditures. There are $2.2 million Tomahawk missiles — the type that killed more than 150 Iranian civilians, most of them school children. And the Zumwalt class of naval destroyers that were billed as a $1.5 billion per ship bargain, but now cost taxpayers $10 billion each. And there are the untold sums spent by self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s department to line the pockets of online influencers. Yep, that’s a thing. American taxpayers are on the hook for all of it. The Pentagon secretly hired conservative military veterans with large online followings to work in undefined roles earlier this year. When called on his participation in the program, for example, Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel with more than 620,000 followers on X, admitted he “came back as a civilian for a short time to help improve our work colleges.” This may mean rooting out supposed woke-ness at the military war colleges, but when TomDispatch asked the Pentagon for clarification, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez failed to comment. What we do know, thanks to recent reporting by Wired, is that Schlichter is a conservative gadfly with extremist views. He has, for instance, suggested that people who don’t have children, don’t own property, and haven’t served in the military shouldn’t be allowed to vote. “Penalize barren, non-familial lifestyles through taxes and disqualification from political participation,” wrote Schlichter. “Establish property and military service qualifications for voting.” He has also lauded murderous dictators from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet to Spain’s Francisco Franco; referred to immigrants as “perverted Third World peasants”; and branded “liberal women” as “self-righteous crones” who “are a pestilence, a plague upon Western society … whose antics, if unchecked, will inevitably lead to the fall of civilization.” Just how many vicious vitriol-spewing vets have been put on the Pentagon payroll and at what cost remains unknown. But there’s plenty of taxpayer-funded largess to pay them — with lots more on the way. Today, TomDispatch regular David Vine exposes a shadow budget loaded with Pentagon excess, waste, and bloat that has grown to epic proportions and may leave Americans on the hook for $1 trillion in secret spending next year if Trump has his way.

— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

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Our Government’s Real Priorities

News reports that next year’s U.S. military budget will top out at $1.5 trillion if President Donald Trump gets his way are misleading at best. The true total, if Trump’s proposal passes, could be at least $1 trillion higher.

Long before Trump took office, U.S. taxpayers have spent far more on the Pentagon — and its wars — than most know. For decades, Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon have hidden the military’s true cost through little-known bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. Journalists, academics, and think tank experts have, with rare exceptions, perpetuated the problem by repeating “official” numbers that don’t come close to telling the full story.

Data shows that the budget was already between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion in the last full fiscal year, 2025, as detailed by a recent Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, report I co-authored. Trump’s requests would add another $781 billion, bringing the potential total to at least $2.581 trillion in 2027.

After Afghanistan Disaster, the Pentagon Is on Track to Get Even More Money

The troubling revelation that the government is misleading the public and effectively hiding hundreds of billions in military spending reflects the out-of-control nature of the Pentagon budget. It’s also the only sector of government spending that seems largely insulated from public scrutiny: Imagine the outrage if news broke that the government was hiding hundreds of billions in spending for public housing, Medicaid, or hunger prevention programs.

If Congress passes Trump’s full budget proposal, military spending will eat up around 75 percent of the discretionary budget Congress controls.

If Congress passes Trump’s full budget proposal, military spending will eat up around 75 percent of the discretionary budget Congress controls.

People have a right to know how much tax money goes to military spending. This is critical to debating the proper size of the military budget both on its own and compared to other spending priorities, particularly any program related to education or the social safety net. Understanding the military’s true cost means understanding where and how the government has been hiding........

© The Intercept