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military budget
Can We Build a Country That Chooses Butter Over Guns?
How do we stop this war? How do we redirect the money being wasted into the schools and health centers, bike lanes and sustainable-energy infrastructures that we all so desperately need?
May 16, 2026
Guns or butter. Butter or guns. Can we have both? If not, which should come first? Consider it one of those chicken-and-egg conundrums of modern society.
“Guns” is the stand-in for a well-funded military and “butter” for all the human goods, comforts, and needs of a society.
Economists, politicians, and generals have long considered the balance of guns and butter. Wage too many wars, produce too many arms, and there won’t be enough money to keep a nation decently fed and comfortable. Produce too many consumer goods, meet everyone’s needs, and a nation might find itself ill-prepared and vulnerable in the face of a possible attack or even invasion. Everyone from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has had something to say about the balance of guns and butter (or, more likely, the lack of it).
No surprise, but I like butter and don’t like guns. I have long been attracted to the graphics produced by groups like the National Priorities Project (NPP) and Brown University’s Costs of War Project that dramatize the opportunity costs of war investment in the United States. At some point, one of those groups created a pen that had a long scroll on a pull-out flap inside it. At parties, as you were discussing the military budget, you could take out that pen and unfurl a long bar graph comparing US military spending to the budgets for education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Neat trick, right?
Every war is bad, stupid, and represents a colossal failure of the imagination, but this one, with the Trump trademark on it, should be considered the ur-war to oppose, resist, and refuse to pay for.
These days, NPP has a new factsheet that offers a breakdown of how the cost (so far) of President Donald Trump’s Iran “escapade” could have been so much better spent:
- Covering Medicaid for all 14 million people at risk of losing their insurance,
- AND the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, for all 4 million people at risk of losing food assistance, including 3.5 million due to new work requirements for older people and caregivers,
- AND expanding Medicaid to an additional 10.3 million people.
Those numbers are based on the Pentagon’s request for $200 billion in supplemental funding for the Iran war effort. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was on Capitol Hill on April 30, supporting a lowball estimate of the war costs as a mere $25 billion (and worth every dollar!) and asking for support for an inconceivable $1.5 trillion for Trump’s war machine in fiscal year 2027. Guns vs. Butter? More like guns force-fed foie gras and caviar and sautéed in the world’s most expensive butter.
Every Warship Launched, Every Rocket Fired
If I ever got a tattoo, it would probably be of this line from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 “Chance for Peace” speech: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Eisenhower gave that speech 73 years ago (even as military budgets increased significantly while he was president) and yet the words ring truer than ever today. In reality, I’m unlikely to get a first tattoo at the age of 52, but I did see all of this up close and personal a couple of weeks ago at my Connecticut town’s school board meeting.
For months, school board members had been ringing an alarm bell about their budget. After years of scrimping and shaving, layoffs and early retirement packages, they were no longer able to economize their way to a balanced budget, and so were considering a “nuclear option”: closing one of our local schools.
Community members rallied, testified, and harangued. Busloads of kids joined our superintendent at the state capitol to ask for more support for our schools. For the last two months, everyone in my neighborhood has been talking about this, and on a Monday night a few weeks ago, the school board held a public meeting to make an ultimate decision about what to do.
I drove there over streets riddled with potholes, past new luxury apartments built as “workforce housing” for the engineers at General Dynamics Electric Boat, where a new class of nuclear submarines (12 boats for $132 billion) is now being designed. Those $2,200-a-month studio apartments overlook a gas station, train tracks, and a low block of struggling businesses in a flood zone.
A Theft from Those Who Hunger
The school budget gap (more than $7 million) is there for all the usual reasons, made more extreme because we’re living through what, in the age of President Donald J. Trump, can only be considered the cratering of imperial America globally and the volume is up to 11 on everything. In these years, the line items for staff health insurance, building utilities, and a host of other costs have skyrocketed. The contributions from the state of Connecticut aren’t even close to keeping pace. The whole enterprise is built on the backs of local property owners, and our taxes are already far too high.
The place most likely to be shuttered was CB Jennings School, right up the road from my house, which has (for the rest of this school year, anyway) 338 students. All but 30 of those students qualify for free or reduced-fare lunches, meaning they come from low-income households. The school population includes 149 “multi-language learners” and 66 special-education students.
The 338 kids there would be divided between the other two elementary schools in our neighborhood. The fifth graders would all go to the local middle school (which itself was to be consolidated from two buildings into one) and the eighth graders to the local high school.
Teachers and custodians, principals and paraprofessional educators, social workers and secretaries will all be moved around, too. Routines will be broken, friendships and collegial collaborations disrupted, teaching teams split up. There will be a great jostling for parking spaces, offices with windows, and classrooms that face out of (or into) the sun. September will be stressful indeed and no one is happy.
Who bears the brunt of all this disorder? The answer: the kids who pay no taxes and make no policies. The little ones who are already deemed behind when they show up for kindergarten and need all the help the professionals there can give them. The tween ones who just want to see their friends, show off their new braids, learn to play the trumpet, and get first place in the spelling bee. The older ones who need the breakfast, lunch, and snacks that are served at school. The ones who bring the light and the joy of learning with them every day.
The lives of those little ones and their slightly bigger siblings are all soon going to be subjected to massive disruptions.
A Theft from Those Who Are Cold
Of course, those “massive disruptions” are only so in relative terms. They’re but a minor hiccup compared to what’s happening in the lives of children throughout Iran during President Trump’s war on their country.
I cry about the war against Iran every day. (Truly!) The terror and the horror buzz through my head at the weirdest times: as I run errands, work in my garden, perform my school-crossing guard duties, and greet my young walkers. All this daily predictability and precious stability, the gorgeous ho-hum of the daily grind that has been stolen from the people of Iran by our war.
I look at pictures of Iranians cleaning up around buildings reduced to rubble and trying to go about their lives amid the catastrophe and I’m filled with awe. How would I ever begin again after surviving a rocket attack? Would I be able to extract the broom from the wreckage or ever brew tea again?
I tried to put such images aside when I went into the school board meeting that fateful night. When it was my turn to speak, I had three points to make—one minor, one secondhand, and one massive. I was nervous. My first point was easy. I argued that the school at the edge of the city should close instead of Jennings, which is more centrally located. My second point was awkward. My 12-year-old had written a speech, but then refused to read it and was whispering contradictory instructions to me as I got up for my turn to speak.
Finally, I got to my third point. Facing a semicircle of board members, I tried to channel the gravitas of President Eisenhower by pointing out that the Trump White House began its war against Iran by hitting a primary school with a Tomahawk cruise missile and killing 165 civilians, most of them schoolgirls. And I pointed out that decisions like the one to start a war with Iran ripple all the way to our coastline—destabilizing our local world and stealing from our kids, too. Closing an elementary school or having a massive budget hole are not our only two options, I said. We could instead be living in a society that prioritizes keeping elementary schools open and fully funded instead of bombing schools 6,700 miles away.
I tried not to think about the room full of parents and teachers behind me, but I still felt uncomfortably out on a limb making my geopolitical points during our local school board meeting. Despite my doubts, however, I continued, noting that between February 28—when my country started that terrible, illegal war—and March 27, the United States had fired 850 Tomahawk missiles at targets in Iran. And mind you, each one of those missiles comes at a cost to taxpayers of more than $3 million.
My three minutes of time were running out, so I rushed through the next part, mentioning that our senator, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), estimated at the beginning of April that Trump’s war is now costing US taxpayers $1 billion dollars a day! And that’s before we factor in the long-term economic consequences of oil and gas price rises, disruptions to the global supply chain, and the cratering of my country’s already teetering standing globally.
I finished up by saying that we all have to work so much harder to stop this war as well as fund our schools and that the two were connected. This budget gap would be a difficult dilemma under the best of circumstances, but against the backdrop of war and calamity, it feels indicative of a much deeper problem than a few-million-dollar local budget holes. As I concluded. I made eye contact with the school board members and thanked them for their time.
Making my way back to my seat, I noticed that I was a little sweaty and that my hands were trembling. Why was I so nervous? Why was that so hard?
The Hopes of Its Children
Eisenhower’s speech is a rhetorical master class, well worth revisiting in this age of imperial fiat by tweet. Ike went on to intone:
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities…. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
After some formalities and hearing from a handful more people, the school board voted to shutter the CB Jennings Elementary School, a remarkably modern school in the heart of our city with a new playground and a beautiful library. The vote was unanimous. The board members were sad but resigned. It was treated as an inevitable but unfortunate outcome or even as a forward-looking, resolute action. They were “doing something” in the face of a huge budget gap.
And indeed, the school budget will be back in the black—for now—once a $1.4 million shortfall is settled by cutting more positions, shaving costs, and looking for grants. Meanwhile, the local schools that remain are indeed closer to a balanced budget (at least until utility costs spike even higher and yet more global war-making costs hit home in this country).
Humanity Hanging from a Cross of Iron
The cost of the war against Iran is just one reason to be against it. The wanton violence, the indiscriminate death dealing, the gold-plated hubris, and the gargantuan stupidity of Trump and crew, as well as the massive long-term impacts of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, are something to try to take in.
Every war is bad, stupid, and represents a colossal failure of the imagination, but this one, with the Trump trademark on it, should be considered the ur-war to oppose, resist, and refuse to pay for. And sitting in that makeshift meeting room of the New London Board of Education, I felt like a tightly wound, somewhat muted Cassandra, requesting that people who are probably against the war, too, somehow consider it part of the reason we are being called upon to close a school and reduce the quality of our kids’ education.
We have a well-worn poster in the back hallway of our house. It’s an image of kids playing on a metal jungle gym alongside the words: “It will be a great day, when our schools get all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”
A bake sale to buy a bomber? A car wash to get a Tomahawk? A dime drive for the next generation of nuclear submarines? This administration’s officials aren’t even pretending to enlist the public in support of their latest war, nor did they even try to get Congress to rubber-stamp it. They care that little for democracy, the rule of law, or even our hearts and minds. This White House grows fat on our outrage, our protest gestures, and our well-mannered critiques. They are printing money and telling lies in a frenzy of impunity that will (hopefully) finally be checked by the November elections. But there is so much violence and scapegoating and scaremongering coming out of Donald Trump’s White House and his Florida compound that many people are checking out on all of it just to carry on with their lives. But nothing now is NORMAL and we can’t allow ourselves to normalize any of it.
How do we stop this war? How do we redirect the money being wasted into the schools and health centers, bike lanes and sustainable-energy infrastructures that we all so desperately need? How do we take care of those victimized, maimed, and orphaned by our military? How do we take care of those rendered homeless, stateless, limbless by our wars?
The answer: We do something to protest, undermine, and challenge militarism every day. We work to connect those faraway wars, framed as invisible or normal or too complicated for us to grasp, to our everyday lives. We make all the awkward speeches we can. We hold up homemade antiwar signs. We refuse to pay for the wars we oppose. We continue to demand that butter, not guns, schools, not heavy bombers, homes, not destroyers be the focus of our lives.
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Hegseth Lampooned for Absurd Video Claiming $1.5 Trillion Pentagon Budget Puts 'American Taxpayer First'
"Performative dipshittery, wrapped in fictional jingoism, delivered by an incompetent drunk wearing the clothes of an adolescent boy," said one critic of Hegseth's video.
May 07, 2026
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth drew instant ridicule on Thursday after he released a video touting President Donald Trump's proposed $1.5 trillion military budget as a fiscally responsible plan that is "putting the American taxpayer first."
At the start of the video, Hegseth accuses defense contractors of bilking the Pentagon for expenses such as factory construction, while also constantly charging more for cost overruns.
Hegseth then claims that Trump has brought together a group of private-sector negotiators whom he's labeled "Deal Team Six" to lay down the law on the defense industry and save the US taxpayer money.
Thanks to President Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, this War Department has moved from bureaucracy to business.
This is a FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE INVESTMENT in our Arsenal of Freedom—ensuring our military remains the most lethal fighting force in the world. pic.twitter.com/ykIfMw3kuU
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) May 7, 2026
Hegseth never explains how it is possible that the president and his "Deal Team Six" are saving US taxpayers money while at the same time asking US taxpayers to fund a $1.5 trillion military budget that would be over 50% more than the 2025 US defense budget and more than four times the money spent on defense by China, the world's second biggest defense spender.
Regardless, Hegseth wrote in a social media post that the $1.5 trillion budget would be "a FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE INVESTMENT in our Arsenal of Freedom—ensuring our military remains the most lethal fighting force in the world."
Critics of the Trump administration erupted in mockery after seeing the Hegseth video.
"Spread this lame ass video everywhere," wrote Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council staffer under President Barack Obama. "I want every voter to know that Trump has requested a $1.5 TRILLION Pentagon budget. Shut up if you want better healthcare or for Social Security to remain solvent. All you get is more bombs to drop on Iranian schools."
Indigo Olivier, a reporter for The New Republic, said Democrats could make the proposed Trump budget a winning issue given how many other problems—including the rising costs of gasoline, groceries, and healthcare—that the Trump administration seemingly has no interest in addressing.
"I would love to hear Democrats talk about Pentagon price gouging with even half the energy they devote to Hasan Piker," she wrote. "The administration pushing a $1.5 trillion defense budget somehow becoming the face of anti-waste messaging is political malpractice."
Former Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) described Trump's proposed Pentagon budget as "hundreds of billions more in waste and fraud—at taxpayer expense."
"Remember when this administration pretended it was going to bring down the national debt?" Amash asked.
Former Republican political strategist Jeff Timmer delivered an even harsher assessment of Hegseth's video, which he labeled "performative dipshittery, wrapped in fictional jingoism, delivered by an incompetent drunk wearing the clothes of an adolescent boy."
Journalist Patrick Henningsen ripped Hegseth for delivering a "desperate, dumbed-down message" that he predicted would "go down in history as one of the biggest own-goals yet—and the worst pieces of war propaganda we’ve ever seen."
Steven Kosiak, nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote an analysis last month of Trump's proposed $1.5 trillion military budget in which he said, "It is difficult to overstate just how massive an increase in defense spending this would represent, or how unhinged it seems to be from reality and sober policymaking."
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To Stop Endless War in Iran and Beyond, Congress Should Rescind the Money to Fight
Faced with the threat of more war in Iran and elsewhere, Congress must do everything in its power to stop Trump. One tool Congress hasn’t used is its power to immediately cut off money for wars.
Apr 21, 2026
As a candidate for president, Donald Trump infamously promised to end endless wars and be the president of peace. In office, President Trump has launched illegal regime change wars in Iran and Venezuela; bombed at least five other countries; threatened war against Cuba, Greenland, Mexico, Panama, and Colombia; and supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza and war in Lebanon.
Despite a two-week ceasefire and diplomatic negotiations with Iran, Trump has deployed thousands of additional troops to the Middle East, while “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has made renewed threats to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure, widely considered a war crime. For the next fiscal year, Trump has requested the largest military budget in US history, $1.5 trillion. He has also indicated he will ask for up to $200 billion more to fund the war in Iran. By all indications, Trump looks likely to return to war, if not in Iran, somewhere else.
Trump’s embrace of endless wars already has killed and injured tens of thousands, displaced millions, squandered tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, driven up prices on gas and other necessities, created a global economic crisis, and risked wider catastrophe and World War III. And don’t forget Trump’s genocidal threats to “wipe out” Iranian civilization, implying a potential nuclear attack.
Faced with the threat of more endless war in Iran and beyond, Congress must do everything in its power to stop Trump. One tool Congress hasn’t used is its power to immediately cut off money for wars in Iran and beyond. With constitutional authority over government spending, Congress can use its rescission power—that is, the power to rescind, or take back, money previously appropriated to government agencies. Specifically, Congress should rescind around one-third of this year’s discretionary budgets for the “Department of War” and Department of Energy, where nuclear weapons spending is hidden, while avoiding cuts that would harm military personnel and their families.
While a rescissions bill of this sort may break with congressional precedent, the future of the country and the world is at stake. Extraordinary threats demand extraordinary measures.
Cutting $350 billion in discretionary spending from the over $1 trillion war budgets would actually help protect the troops by making it harder, if not impossible, for Trump to deploy them into harm’s way to fight his wars. While a $350 billion cut may sound daunting, it would leave the country with a total military budget far larger than that of China and Russia combined and allow the military to focus on defending the country rather than squandering billions on endless wars.
While only two Republican Congress members have voted to stop Trump’s war in Iran, Democrats should advance a rescissions bill to continue to apply pressure to end the war in Iran and show they won’t fund another day of endless war. While a rescissions bill is unlikely to pass now, we may soon see more Republicans defecting from Trump’s sinking presidency and increasingly unhinged behavior. While a rescissions bill of this sort may break with congressional precedent, the future of the country and the world is at stake. Extraordinary threats demand extraordinary measures.
Cutting the War Budget Now
Given what we’ve seen from Trump, how can he be trusted to continue to control a military budget that already exceeds $1 trillion? Doing so is to almost literally leave loaded guns in the hands of an increasingly erratic and dangerous man.
The danger Trump poses underlines the desperate need to get Trump out of office as quickly as possible through impeachment or the 25th Amendment. Amid these efforts and continued attempts to pass Iran War Powers Resolutions to prevent Trump from waging war without congressional approval, Congress should help protect the country and the world by removing the funds available to Trump to make more war.
Allowing Donald Trump to continue to control the entirety of this year’s Pentagon budget—let alone a larger one next year—risks his not only continuing his immoral, illegal war in Iran but also his likely launching new wars, including, for example, in Cuba and most frightening of all with China.
Congress has the power to take back money it’s previously appropriated to the Pentagon just as it has passed thousands of rescissions bills to take back all kinds of funding it previously approved.
There are at least three forms a rescissions bill could take. Under each, the bill won’t take pay or services from military personnel or their family members. It will instead take money from weapons makers and others profiting off war and budgets that make the military an offensive, endless war fighting force. A rescissions bill could rescind money for war and:
- Return the money to citizens in the form of $600 to $1,200 stimulus checks (or a “peace dividend”) and some lowering of the national debt, as military budget expert Stephen Semler has proposed. As Semler says, this proposal could appeal to people across the political spectrum given the longstanding affordability crisis, which has been worsened by the rising price of gas and other necessities thanks to Trump’s new war.
- Reappropriate—that is, redirect—the funds as a peace dividend to defend people’s daily lives by improving and expanding access to things like Medicare and Medicaid, free school lunches and other food assistance, childcare, affordable housing, and other critical infrastructure.
- Return the money to the US Treasury to reduce the near $40 trillion national debt.
Importantly, a rescissions bill could reclaim both money not yet obligated—that is, not yet committed to spending—and money that has been obligated. Both offer an opportunity to take money back from some of the hugely expensive, unnecessary, and often world-endangering weapons systems and the war profiteers who make them. This includes funding for new nuclear weapons, the F-35 fighter jet (the world’s most expensive weapons system that has a terrible record of actually being able to fly), its planned sequel F-47, and Trump’s technologically infeasible fantasy “golden dome” missile defense system. A rescissions bill could mandate specific budget cuts or could cut a percentage from all Pentagon and nuclear weapons accounts except those supporting military personnel and their families.
Is It Realistic?
A rescissions bill is unlikely to pass in today’s Congress. To now, only two Republicans have voted for War Powers Resolutions to stop the war in Iran. However, the resolutions failed by just a few votes given the tiny Republican majority in Congress. And we don’t know what Congress will look like in one month or three, when more Republicans may abandon Trump.
Democrats and others shouldn’t be afraid of the tired shibboleth that military spending is about “supporting the troops”—it is increasingly obvious that increasingly large military budgets have made it easier to wage offensive, catastrophic wars of choice that have put troops in harm’s way, causing tens of thousands of troop deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries, in addition to millions more dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, and far beyond.
A rescissions bill also gives politicians an opportunity to vote “yes” to cut the Pentagon budget; “yes” to a peace dividend; “yes” to using taxpayer money to actually defend the country and improve national security.
Even if a rescissions bill can’t pass now, it can be another way to pressure the administration to end the US-Israeli war in Iran and Lebanon. Along with war powers resolutions, a rescissions bill is another way to demonstrate continuing opposition to this and other endless wars. It’s a way to keep the media focused on a war that’s been all too distant from many people’s lives in the US. It’s a way to do everything humanly possible to stop wars that have already killed and injured tens of thousands and that could exceed the catastrophe of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq if they continue.
A rescissions bill will also allow constituents and journalists to ask Congress members and midterm candidates, “Do you want to fund more endless war or do you think Congress should take money back from the Pentagon to prevent more war and fund things we need? Do you think we can trust Trump with the current Pentagon budget or not? Do you think we can trust that Trump won’t use the out-of-control military budget to restart the war with Iran and start new wars, most terrifyingly a potential nuclear war with China?”
A rescissions bill also gives politicians an opportunity to vote “yes” to cut the Pentagon budget; “yes” to a peace dividend; “yes” to using taxpayer money to actually defend the country and improve national security; “yes” to a rational, realistic, defense-focused military budget rather than a military budget designed for offensive wars.
While Trump has trashed his promise to “stop wars” not start them, Congress has the power to pass a rescissions bill that would protect the country and the world from more endless war while transforming the US military into the defensive force it should be.
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