A new report by the Project on Government Oversight, “The True Total U.S. Military Budget,” explains that the commonly cited U.S. military budget (around $1 trillion) is a substantial understatement, as it excludes military-related costs spread across other federal agencies and accounts. The analysis contends that both the government and journalists have “long failed to accurately report what taxpayers spend on war and the military,” and the spending figures reported by Congress and the executive branch are “profoundly incomplete.”
Real costs include nuclear-weapons programs funded by the Department of Energy, veterans’ benefits and health care, military retirement and health obligations funded through Treasury accounts, and military-related spending in the Departments of State and Homeland Security. Together, these put the actual U.S. military budget for FY 2025 between $1.5 and $1.8 trillion. (If spending on interest payments is included, then the budget could stretch to between $1.7 and $2.3 trillion.)
DAVID VINE; [email protected]
Vine is a fellow at the Transition Security Project and former professor of anthropology at American University.
Vine told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “For way too long, Congress and presidents and much of the media have been profoundly misleading the country about how much of the country’s wealth and taxpayer money have been poured into military and war––and how much money is not being dedicated to pressing needs in people’s lives, like health care, child care, affordable housing, energy and infrastructure, and much more.”
These numbers have been previously obscured because of “congressional bureaucracy and the intricacies of an increasingly complicated spending and appropriations system that have effectively hidden huge amounts of military spending in a variety of budgets. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been hidden and obscured. People don’t see [those funds] as military spending, because they’re considered ‘mandatory’ spending even though it’s all discretionary. The media has tended to follow the spending process in a way that has treated terminology and categories of Congress as law passed down by some supreme being, rather than helping people in the country understand where their money is going. We need a plain language understanding of where taxpayer money is going and how much is going to the military writ large.
“Our report emphasizes that experts on the Pentagon budget, and U.S. budgeting generally, have been showing this for many years. Our new methodology underlines this overwhelming consensus that the government has been hiding hundreds of billions of military spending in other budgets. The amount of money hidden in mandatory budgets for the retirement benefits and pensions for military personnel includes money that the Pentagon isn’t paying. Instead, the Secretary of War can tell the Treasury to pay its bills. That is galling and shocking. No other government agency has the ability to say, ‘we don’t have the money in our budget, so Treasury, you pay for it.’ That’s an outrage… The Pentagon remains the only government agency that has never been able to pass an audit.
“Our report also reflects the ambiguity that we can’t know for sure exactly how much U.S. taxpayers are spending on the military, even though we should be able to have a single, authoritative, comprehensive figure. The fact that we cannot provide that number is a reflection of a problem in the system… The newest methodology does point to our best estimate––between $1.7 and $1.9 trillion. This figure already exceeds what Trump has suggested for the new budget ($1.5 trillion). If Congress, in an act of complete irresponsibility, gives Trump that in addition to the true total military spending, it would be close to $3 trillion.”