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President Trump\u2019s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal, released Friday, calls for boosting total defense funding to $1.5 trillion\u2014a jump that most economists say would represent one of the largest budget increases in American history, rivaling the wartime mobilization of World War II.<\/p>\n
The proposal would increase base defense discretionary spending by $251 billion and funnel an additional $350 billion into defense through a new reconciliation bill, while cutting nondefense discretionary spending by just $73 billion\u2014a 10% reduction that budget watchdogs say falls far short of offsetting the military buildup. The net result, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), is a defense expansion of more than $3.2 trillion over the next decade, adding fuel to a national debt already hovering around $39 trillion. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe gap between rhetoric and reality is just so massive,\u201d said Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University. \u201cMAGA was told an untruth by Trump\u2014no foreign wars, no adventurism. Now the defense budget has come in at $1 trillion, and he wants $1.5 trillion. This is a massive militarization\u2014completely the opposite of what he told his base.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said this isn\u2019t quite the largest budget increase in U.S. history\u2014just the largest in the past 80 years or so. The U.S. military budget request of $100 billion in 1943\u2014the peak of World War II mobilization\u2014is worth approximately $1.9 trillion in today\u2019s dollars, by Smetters\u2019s calculation and even more as a share of GDP. \u201cThe movement of $350 billion toward mandatory spending is pretty interesting,\u201d Smetters added, flagging how the reconciliation maneuver structurally shifts the nature of the defense commitment in ways that make it harder to reverse.<\/p>\n
The budget arrives without official top-line deficit or debt figures, which CRFB president Maya MacGuineas described as an \u201castonishing lack of information.\u201d The White House\u2019s supplemental documents project that debt would fall to roughly 94% of GDP by 2036, compared with 120% in the Congressional Budget Office\u2019s baseline\u2014but only by assuming 3% average annual real GDP growth over the entire decade. Smetters flagged that assumption as \u201cquite high\u201d and a subject warranting its own scrutiny.<\/p>\n
More than a month into the U.S. military campaign against Iran, President Trump finds himself in a precarious political moment, presiding over a deeply unpopular war with widespread economic fallout and facing some of the lowest approval ratings of his second term. The costs have been staggering: The war cost an estimated $11.3 billion in its first six days alone, and new estimates put total spending at roughly $30 billion to $45 billion just over a month in.\u00a0Meanwhile, the administration has not articulated a clear endgame, with stated reasons for the attack shifting repeatedly\u2014from dismantling Iran\u2019s nuclear program, to regime change, and back again.<\/p>\n
Gas prices have surged by roughly a third; the stock market has tumbled to its lowest levels of the year, before recovering on the faint hope of the war ending soon; and even Trump\u2019s own base is showing signs of erosion, with approval among his 2024 voters down six points and support among independents plunging to 22%. At a private White House event on Friday, Trump uttered the unthinkable, according to the Associated Press, saying that America\u2019s century-old social safety net might be demolished to pay for military adventurism. \u201cWe\u2019re fighting wars. We can\u2019t take care of day care,\u201d Trump said. \u201cIt\u2019s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare\u2014all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can\u2019t do it on a federal.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Plowshares into swords\u2019<\/p>\n
Hanke reached for a biblical image to capture the scale of the reversal. \u201cIt\u2019s a classic plowshares into swords,\u201d he said\u2014invoking Joel 3:10\u2019s call to remilitarize, the deliberate inversion of the prophet Isaiah\u2019s famous vision of lasting peace. The phrase has entered secular use to describe exactly this kind of moment: the urgent conversion of a peacetime economy back onto a war footing. Given Europe\u2019s parallel rearmament surge, it is a shorthand with renewed global resonance.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith deficits larger than 6% of GDP and debt around the size of the economy, the president doesn\u2019t propose any plan for putting our budget on a sustainable path,\u201d MacGuineas said.<\/p>\n
Another nonpartisan watchdog, Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted that since President Trump took office in 2025, the national debt has increased by $2.8 trillion, and taxpayers are now paying nearly $1 trillion annually just to service that debt. \u201cThis budget request does nothing to improve the nation\u2019s fiscal trajectory,\u201d the group said. \u201cIn fact, it moves us further in the wrong direction.\u201d<\/p>\n
The budget will set the U.S. on a \u201cperilous fiscal path,\u201d the group argued, calling the $1.5 trillion Pentagon spending spree \u201ca major driver of this dangerous fiscal trajectory.\u201d With the administration seeking much of the funding boost through the reconciliation process, the group argues that it amounts to \u201chanding the Pentagon an unaccountable slush fund.\u201d<\/p>\n
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has already issued a public warning about the trajectory. \u201cThe country has to get back to ensuring that the economy is growing fast enough to keep pace with spending,\u201d Powell said earlier this week in a moderated conversation at Harvard University. \u201cIt will not end well if we don\u2019t do something fairly soon,\u201d he said, referring to the growth rate of the nation\u2019s $39 trillion debt and annual deficits.<\/p>\n
The budget also leaves Social Security on track toward insolvency within the decade, according to CRFB, without proposing structural fixes. Hanke noted the cascading pressure the defense surge creates. \u201cOnce you push defense to $1.5 trillion, that puts Social Security on even shakier ground,\u201d he said. In the biblical sequence Hanke invoked, the plowshares-into-swords moment is the penultimate act\u2014the mobilization before the reckoning. For America\u2019s fiscal hawks, the reckoning feels closer than ever.<\/p>\n
For this story,\u00a0Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/p>\n
#Trump #raised #trillion #national #debt #largest #budget #hike #World #War #IIand #figure #pay<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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