Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a busy man. When he isn’t working out with fellow Cabinet members and denying promotions to Black and female officers, he’s making videos ordering the troops to take testosterone tests to prove they are manly enough to serve their country. He’s fighting the culture war morning, noon and night. When he can find the extra time, he’s also running the Pentagon as it wages war in Iran, commits murder on the high seas in the Caribbean and prepares to invade Cuba — and possibly Mali and Greenland. Hegseth has a lot on his plate.
That includes demanding a $454 billion increase in the 2027 Pentagon budget, which brings the total request to nearly $1.5 trillion — a 44% increase from the previous year. Hegseth has called this a “generational investment” that comes out roughly to all of U.S. military spending in World War II. You might think that it’s because of Donald Trump’s war in Iran and all the munitions the military is going through, but you would be wrong because, like most wars, it is paid for separately from the Pentagon budget through emergency supplemental requests.
