Trump Proposes $1.5 Trillion Defence Budget — the Largest Year-Over-Year Increase Since World War II

President Trump delivered his 2027 budget request to Congress on Friday: $1.5 trillion for defence, including $1.1 trillion in base Pentagon spending and $350 billion for the Iran war. It is by far the largest year-over-year increase in defence spending in the post-World War II era. Domestic programmes would be cut by 10%. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the plan would add $6.9 trillion to the national debt over a decade.

The numbers are so large they have ceased to communicate meaning. One point five trillion dollars. That is what Donald Trump wants to spend on the American military next year. It is more than the entire GDP of Australia. It is roughly fifteen times what the United States spent on education last year. And it would represent the largest single-year increase in defence spending since the country was fighting Germany and Japan simultaneously.

The breakdown

The budget splits into two parts. The base defence budget — the cost of maintaining the military in peacetime — would rise to $1.1 trillion, up from approximately $900 billion in the current fiscal year. On top of that, Trump is requesting $350 billion in supplemental funding for the Iran war, covering the cost of munitions, fuel, deployed troops, naval operations in the Gulf, and the replacement of aircraft and equipment lost in combat.

The $350 billion war supplemental is itself extraordinary. For context, the entire first year of the Iraq war cost approximately $79 billion in 2003 dollars. Even adjusting for inflation, Trump is asking for more than three times that amount for a conflict that is supposedly “nearing completion.”

Where the money goes

The Pentagon would use the increase to accelerate procurement of precision munitions, which have been expended at a rate that has alarmed military planners. The US has fired more cruise missiles and guided bombs in five weeks of the Iran war than it did in the entire first year of the Iraq campaign. Stockpiles of certain munition types are running low. Replenishing them takes years, not months.

The budget also includes significant increases for shipbuilding, missile defence, and the nuclear triad — spending that has nothing to do with Iran but everything to do with the long-term competition with China. Trump is using the war as the justification for a permanent expansion of the military-industrial base that will outlast any ceasefire.

The domestic cost

To partially offset the defence increase, Trump proposes cutting non-defence discretionary spending by 10%. This means less money for the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department, housing programmes, scientific research, and virtually every domestic function of the federal government. The administration describes this as “shifting responsibilities to state and local governments.” Critics describe it as gutting the social safety net to fund a war.

Even with the domestic cuts, the budget does not come close to balancing. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the plan would add $5.8 trillion in defence spending over the next decade and $6.9 trillion to the national debt once interest costs are included. The national debt already stands at $39 trillion. Under Trump’s budget, it would approach $46 trillion by 2036.

Congress will not pass this budget as written. It never does. But the document reveals the president’s priorities with brutal clarity: more money for war, less money for everything else, and no plan whatsoever to pay for any of it.