Despite describing himself as a "fiscal hawk," President Donald Trump asked for an additional $113 billion for the Department of Defense in his discretionary budget request. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, appropriates $37 billion more for defense spending than Trump requested. While some of this money may go to projects integral to national security, much of it is expensive pork for defense contractors.
The bill, if passed by the Senate, would add an estimated $2.3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. It would appropriate an additional $150 billion to the Defense Department's already-bloated $848 billion budget, bringing the agency's account to nearly $1 trillion in FY 2026. The additional appropriations in the bill from the Committee on Armed Services, which oversees Pentagon spending, span 37 pages, 16 sections, and 232 items.
In the air, over $500 million will go to Air Force exercises in the Pacific, a rather expensive way to saber-rattle with China. Nearly $1 billion will be allocated to "accelerate" production of the FA/XX aircraft and the F-47, which Trump touted as the "Next Generation Air Dominance" platform that will be "the most advanced, capable, and lethal aircraft ever built." But investing this much in another manned aircraft seems anachronistic while appropriating more than $10 billion for unmanned aerial weapons systems such as General Atomics' YFQ-42A and Anduril's YFQ-44A, autonomous one-way attack systems, unmanned surface and underwater weapons systems, and other artificial intelligence and autonomous capabilities.
