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military budget
We Salute, Then We Abandon: The Betrayal of America’s Veterans
We’ve built a system that honors veterans with ceremony but abandons them in practice. The Trump administration’s spending priorities only make this worse.
May 27, 2025
The draft notice came on May 28, 1968—just a few days after high school graduation. He’d been working nights at the mill since February, saving up for a car. It was the first big thing he’d ever bought: a 1969 Pontiac Firebird, deep blue, four-barrel V8. He didn’t even have plates on it yet. His plan was to spend the summer driving—county roads, lakeside highways, maybe as far as Colorado if the money stretched. That was the future, as far as he could see it: a car, a road, freedom.
He figured he’d be back in a year or two. He felt certain of it—sure that the country asking for his service would still be there to welcome him home.
His uncle helped him bring the Firebird out to the farm and back it into the barn. They threw a tarp over the hood like they were sealing something up for safekeeping. When he returned, he thought, he’d pull it off, turn the key, and drive like no time had passed.
At the same moment funding was being clawed back from veterans sleeping in cars, Congress was being asked to greenlight unprecedented new spending on weapons, drones, and missile systems.
What he didn’t know—what no one tells you in the recruiter’s office or in the grainy footage of presidents giving speeches—is how long it takes to feel like you’ve really come home. Or what it feels like to live in a country that thanks you for your service but resents having to keep its promise.
That Firebird was sold 20 years ago to cover a surgery Veterans Affairs (VA) wouldn’t pay for. The barn’s long gone too. And now, in his 70s, the man who once covered that car with a tarp sits at a kitchen table with a blinking laptop and a stack of printouts, trying to navigate a benefits portal that feels like it was built to confuse him. He clicks through broken links, resubmits forms, dials numbers that go to voicemail. He’s not afraid of war anymore. He’s afraid of being forgotten. Of being told there’s no record of his claim. Of finding out too late that the service he relied on has been quietly defunded.
This year, Memorial Day arrived with its usual rituals—flag-raising, wreath-laying, the half-mast slow choreography of remembrance. But beneath the ceremony, something else is happening. Just days after taking office, the Trump administration launched a freeze on federal financial assistance across dozens of programs, including those housed within the Department of Veterans Affairs. Memo M-25-13 ordered agencies to halt disbursements for any grant or aid program considered inconsistent with the administration’s values. No list was released. No criteria published. By 5:00 pm the following day, payments were to stop.
The impact on veterans was immediate and severe. More than 44 VA-supported programs were effectively frozen overnight. The Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF)—a backbone initiative that helps tens of thousands of veterans each year stay housed through rental assistance, case management, and emergency aid—was halted. The Grant and Per Diem (GPD) program, which funds transitional housing, peer mentorship, and reintegration for unhoused veterans, was put on hold. Legal aid clinics that help veterans resolve fines, access overdue benefits, and prevent evictions had their funding suspended or marked for review. Suicide prevention programs lost staffing and stability. Hotline response times lengthened. Providers pulled back outreach. Veterans called in, asking the same questions over and over: Is my housing still covered? Is the program still running? Will anyone still pick up the phone?
In many cases, the people on the other end didn’t have answers. Some had already been laid off.
After a wave of lawsuits and public outcry, a federal court issued an injunction. The memo was withdrawn, but the strategy was not. The administration made clear that programs centered on housing, reintegration, climate resilience, or “nontraditional” care models would remain under scrutiny. Meanwhile, federal officials quietly sunsetted the VA Servicing Purchase Program—a pandemic-era mortgage relief tool that allowed the VA to purchase delinquent loans and offer more affordable terms to struggling veterans. Over 5,000 veterans avoided foreclosure because of that program. There was no press release. No transition. Just silence.
Then Trump proposed the largest defense budget in American history: over $1 trillion for 2026. It was a stunning figure, even in a country accustomed to massive Pentagon spending. But what made it feel grotesque was the timing. At the same moment funding was being clawed back from veterans sleeping in cars, Congress was being asked to greenlight unprecedented new spending on weapons, drones, and missile systems. A trillion for war. But nothing for the woman calling a crisis line after her motel voucher runs out. Nothing for the outreach team trying to find a veteran living under an overpass. Nothing for the caseworker explaining to yet another caller that the check might be delayed.
This isn’t about belt-tightening. It’s about priorities. And those priorities have consequences.
Across the country, nonprofits that deliver VA-funded services are shrinking. Some are shutting down. Others are operating with skeleton crews, working double shifts to prevent people from falling through the cracks. Suicide rates among veterans remain stubbornly high—nearly double the civilian average. Women veterans, now one of the fastest-growing homeless populations in the U.S., are bearing the brunt of service gaps and shelter closures. In cities like Phoenix, Cleveland, and San Diego, outreach teams report rising waitlists, rising anxiety, and rising numbers of veterans returning for help they were once stable enough to no longer need.
The policy is abstract. The harm is not.
This isn’t about a man and his Firebird. It’s about the distance between what we say and what we do. It’s about the uncomfortable truth that we’ve built a system that honors veterans with ceremony but abandons them in practice. A system where aid is conditional, where services are quietly withdrawn, and where the paperwork is designed to wear people down.
We do not honor the dead by abandoning the living. We do not preserve freedom by gutting the systems that make it real. And we do not fulfill our patriotic duties by breaking the promises made to the very people who upheld them.
Memorial Day has passed. But the test it asks of us—who we are, what we stand for, and who we stand with—remains.
So the question is this: Will we salute once a year and forget by Tuesday? Or will we become a nation that matches its pageantry with policy, its slogans with service, its rhetoric with resources?
Veterans do not need ceremony. They need care. They need consistency. They need housing. They need healthcare. They need legal aid. They need a country that doesn’t ask them to prove again and again that they are worth helping.
And they need it now.
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Trump Pledges $1 Trillion for US Military While Hitting Working Class With Huge Tax Hike
"Spending $1 trillion on the Pentagon while hollowing out resources for diplomacy and launching a global trade war is a recipe for international conflict and American decline," warned one analyst.
Apr 08, 2025
President Donald Trump on Monday publicly backed an annual budget of roughly $1 trillion for the U.S. military as his administration rushed ahead with a destructive tariff scheme that amounts to a major tax increase on American households, with working-class families set to bear much of the pain.
Speaking to reporters at the White House during a sit-down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said his administration has signed off on an upcoming military budget in the vicinity of $1 trillion, which would be a record sum. The military budget for the current fiscal year is $892 billion, more than half of the federal government's discretionary budget.
"Nobody's seen anything like it," Trump said Monday of his $1 trillion budget proposal.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth later chimed in on social media, voicing enthusiastic support for a $1 trillion military budget and vowing to spend those dollars "on lethality and readiness."
Watch Trump's comments:
Thank you Mr. President!
COMING SOON: the first TRILLION dollar @DeptofDefense budget.
President @realDonaldTrump is rebuilding our military — and FAST.
(PS: we intend to spend every taxpayer dollar wisely — on lethality and readiness) pic.twitter.com/WcZlNAHgDG
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) April 7, 2025
William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, warned in a statement Tuesday that "spending $1 trillion on the Pentagon while hollowing out resources for diplomacy and launching a global trade war is a recipe for international conflict and American decline."
"The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught us that a military-first approach to foreign policy is both ineffective and immensely costly in blood and treasure," said Hartung. "As for dealing with the challenge posed by China, we need a more balanced approach that mixes diplomacy with deterrence and keeps open the option for dialogue and cooperation on urgent issues like climate change, pandemics, and the perilous state of the global economy."
"Pursuing a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget at the expense of other priorities," he added, "would be a trillion-dollar blunder."
Trump and Hegseth's remarks indicate that the Pentagon—long a hotbed of waste and egregious abuse of taxpayer money, largely for the benefit of private contractors—will likely remain insulated from the Elon Musk-led effort to dismantle federal agencies under the guise of boosting government efficiency.
In February, Hegseth authored a memo instructing Pentagon leaders to draw up plans to reduce the military budget in each of the next five years. But it soon became clear that the Pentagon leadership is pushing to divert funds to Trump priorities—including his proposed Iron Dome for America boondoggle—rather than reduce overall spending.
Under Democratic and Republican presidents, and with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, the U.S. military budget has been steadily racing toward the $1 trillion mark year after year, despite the Pentagon's inability to pass an audit and mounting evidence of large-scale fraud and misuse of taxpayer money.
Trump's budget proposal would have to be approved by the Republican-controlled Congress, which is currently working—with the president's support—to further slash taxes for the rich and large corporations and cut Medicare, food aid, and other federal assistance programs.
"Trump plans on liquidating Medicaid and SNAP benefits while giving the Pentagon a trillion dollars," wrote Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute. "If the Democrats can't make a coherent political message out of these basic facts, they're not an opposition party, or even a party."
This story has been updated to include a statement from William Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
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Sure Looks Like Hegseth's Proposed Pentagon 'Cuts' Wouldn't Be Cuts at All
"It seems that this announcement may amount to a money-moving exercise within the agency itself rather than an overall Pentagon topline reduction," said one watchdog.
Feb 20, 2025
On the surface, a widely reported memo authored by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth appears to call for significant cuts to the massive U.S. military budget over each of the next five years—a proposal that quickly received positive feedback from some progressives.
But the details of Hegseth's proposal, and a public statement from the defense secretary's deputy, raise serious doubts about whether the floated spending "cuts" would be cuts at all.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Hegseth, in an internal memo, "ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years." Hegseth instructed officials to hand in their proposals by this coming Monday.
In response to the Post's reporting, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), long a vocal proponent of cutting the military budget as it approaches $1 trillion a year with bipartisan approval, wrote on social media that "when the Pentagon cannot complete an independent audit, we should cut military spending by 8% a year over the next five years."
"These savings should go to increasing Social Security benefits and strengthening VA healthcare," Sanders added.
That is not what the administration appears to have in mind.
In a statement issued Wednesday as headlines in major media outlets characterized Hegseth's memo as a striking call for "cuts," Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Salesses described the proposal as a push for "offsets" that could be used to fund other military-related efforts favored by President Donald Trump, including an "Iron Dome for America" that experts have ridiculed as a wasteful "fantasy."
"The department will develop a list of potential offsets that could be used to fund these priorities, as well as to refocus the department on its core mission of deterring and winning wars," said Salesses. "The offsets are targeted at 8% of the Biden administration's FY26 budget, totaling around $50 billion, which will then be spent on programs aligned with President Trump's priorities."
The U.S. military budget for Fiscal Year 2025 is roughly $850 billion.
I don’t understand the stories about the supposed cuts to the defense budget. If you “cut” parts of the defense budget and say you’re going to spend that money on a missile defense system…. that’s not really cutting the defense budget?
[image or embed]
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) February 20, 2025 at 1:14 AM
Hegseth's memo also reportedly exempts more than a dozen categories from being used for offsets, including nuclear weapon modernization, military operations at the southern U.S. border, and one-way attack drones.
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said Wednesday that "there is plenty of opportunity—and a desperate need for—deep cuts in Pentagon spending, if that is in fact what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is proposing."
"However, it seems that this announcement may amount to a money-moving exercise within the agency itself rather than an overall Pentagon topline reduction," said Weissman. "The Hegseth proposal wrongly exempts 17 categories from cuts, including areas that are ripe for savings and which should themselves be curtailed in the name of national security, like the nation's nuclear arsenal, missile defense, and drones. These protected categories give clues to the administration's priorities that may be disguised in partial reports about the Hegseth memo: increased militarization and ever-increasing corporate profits."
"It's too soon to know exactly what the Hegseth proposal entails, or if it would deliver actual cuts, and so not possible to issue even a preliminary assessment," he added. "But this much remains clear: It's time to cut—not increase—the Pentagon budget, and to devote the savings to human needs."
The details of Hegseth's memo emerged as Trump threw his support behind a House GOP budget blueprint that calls for a $100 billion increase in U.S. military spending, underscoring the administration's contradictory posture on the issue.
CNN noted Wednesday that "Hegseth himself called for an increase to the defense budget one week ago."
"While visiting Stuttgart, Germany," the outlet reported, "Hegseth said, 'I think the U.S. needs to spend more than the Biden administration was willing to, who historically underinvested in the capabilities of our military.'"
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