SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
pentagon budget
Trump's $1.5 Trillion Pentagon Budget Will Make US Weaker
Passing this proposed budget would be a recipe for endless war, while undermining the nation's ability to address the truly pressing problems at home that demand our urgent attention.
Apr 03, 2026
It has been reported that the Pentagon on Friday will release a proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2027 of almost $1.5 trillion, with approximately $1.15 trillion in discretionary spending contained in the department’s regular annual budget and an additional $350 billion dependent on Congress including it in a separate budget reconciliation bill.
Whatever vehicles the administration chooses to promote this huge increase, it will be doubling down on a failed budgetary and national security strategy. If passed as requested, $1.5 trillion in Pentagon spending—in a single year–will make America weaker by underwriting a misguided strategy, funding outmoded weapons programs, and crowding out other essential public investments.
The current war in the Middle East is a case study in the ineffectiveness of an overreliance on military force in seeking to make America or the world a safer place. In his first term, President Trump abandoned a multilateral agreement that was effectively blocking Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. Six years later, in his second term, the president initially justified his disastrous intervention against Iran as being motivated by fears of that very same program.
The current war in the Middle East is a case study in the ineffectiveness of an overreliance on military force in seeking to make America or the world a safer place.
Diplomacy worked. Reckless resort to force does not, as evidenced by the devastating human, budgetary, and global economic consequences of the current Middle East war. Passing a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget would be a recipe for endless war.
Meanwhile, other, non-military investments needed to protect the lives and livelihoods of Americans are being sharply reduced. By one account, the first week of the war on Iran cost $11.6 billion. That’s more than the Trump administration proposed for the annual budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency combined for this year. Yet addressing the climate crisis and the need to prevent future outbreaks of disease are essential to the safety and security of Americans.
The administration has also reduced our available tools of influence on the foreign policy front by decimating the Agency for International Development, laying off trained diplomats at the State Department, and withdrawing from major international agreements. This leaves force and the threat of force as virtually the last tools standing for promoting U.S. security interests.
Diplomacy worked. Reckless resort to force does not.
The Pentagon doesn’t need more spending, it needs more spending discipline. Spending billions of dollars on a Golden Dome system that can never achieve the President’s dream of a leak proof missile defense system is sheer waste, as is continuing to lavish funds on overpriced, underperforming combat aircraft like the F-35, or multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers that are vulnerable to modern high speed missiles.
The truth is, there are not enough factories, or skilled workers, or materials to effectively spend such a huge increase. It will be a recipe for waste, fraud and abuse.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Better Uses for the Money Pete Hegseth Wants to Throw at Trump's Illegal Iran War
The $200 billion that Hegseth now wants for his and Trump’s Iran war could instead feed and care for everyone at risk of losing healthcare or food aid due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Mar 25, 2026
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth would rather use your tax dollars to bomb Iranian families than feed American families.
That’s the upshot of news that Hegseth is prepared to request $200 billion in funding for the Pentagon’s new war on Iran. That’s far higher than earlier reports that put the request at $50 billion or $100 billion. And all of these astounding sums would come on top of the $1 trillion already budgeted for the Pentagon, itself a record.
It should be clear: Funding this unjust, unpopular, and illegal war comes directly at the expense of ordinary Americans.
Less than a year after the passage of Trump’s signature “Big Beautiful Bill,” which made deep cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—and right in the middle of an affordability crisis—this is the last thing the country needs. That same bill added $150 billion for the Pentagon, pushing the Pentagon budget over $1 trillion for the first time since World War II—and directly enabling the war on Iran.
This is a war of choice that is only making the world more dangerous and more expensive for Americans.
Half of Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities like food, housing, transportation, and healthcare. Trump’s Big Bad Bill threatens to take health insurance from 17 million people and some or all food assistance from 4 million people.
The $200 billion that Hegseth now wants for his and Trump’s Iran war could instead feed and care for all of those people—plus medical care for the 1.8 million veterans of the last forever war who still live with disabilities, for an entire year. For good measure, we could also expand Head Start to serve six times as many kids next year—from just over 700,000 to 4.2 million kids—with what’s left over.
What’s more, it comes on the heels of more shocking news about waste at the Pentagon—a problem for generations, but especially under this administration.
News recently broke, for example, that Hegseth’s Pentagon blew nearly $100 billion last September alone. As they raced to use up funds in their budget, the Pentagon shelled out millions on luxuries like lobster, steak, and crab—all while working Americans were battling rising food prices and getting their SNAP benefits cut.
“In the last five days of September alone, the department blew through $50.1 billion on just grants and contracts,” The New Republic reported. “For context, only nine other countries spend that much on the entirety of their defense budget per year. It’s also more than the total military budgets of Canada and Mexico combined.”
Too many Americans are hungry, sick, and struggling to afford housing and other necessities. We should spend our tax dollars meeting those needs—not throwing more at our $1 trillion Pentagon for a pointless war most of us oppose. Secretary Hegseth can cut back on steak and lobster if he needs the extra cash.
This is a war of choice that is only making the world more dangerous and more expensive for Americans. We should remember the lies that led us into war in Iraq a generation ago. That war ultimately cost nearly $3 trillion, which cost a generation of investments that could have made life better for struggling Americans today.
We must not go down that path again. Our tax dollars should be helping our neighbors and our communities, not feeding new forever wars.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Military-Industrial Complex 2.0: Big Tech's War of All Against All
Silicon Valley wants us to believe that the only way to “win” a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings.
Mar 10, 2026
“I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us,” said Alex Karp, the CEO of the emerging military tech firm Palantir. Far from an offhand outburst, his statement reflects a broader ethos taking hold in Silicon Valley’s military-tech sector, one that treats coercion as innovation, cruelty as candor, and the unchecked application of technological power as both inevitable and desirable.
Karp loves verbal combat as much as he likes running a firm that makes high-tech weaponry. His company has helped Israel increase the pace at which it has bombed and slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, and its technology has helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accelerate deportations, while also helping locate and identify demonstrators in Minneapolis. Not only is Karp unapologetic about the damage done by his company’s products, he openly revels in it.
This February, he told a CNBC interviewer that, “if you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections.” (That amendment being the one that protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”) Yet Karp’s speculation hasn’t led him to ask ICE to stop using his software in its war on peaceful dissent, nor has it dissuaded him from accepting an open-ended, $1 billion contract with ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In keeping with his full-throated support for repression at home and abroad, at the height of the Gaza war, Karp held a Palantir board meeting in Tel Aviv, proclaiming that “our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.”
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what’s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.
In an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, he summed up his philosophy this way: “I actually am a progressive. I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers—I’m trying to be nice here—out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”
Reality, however, is anything but that simple. Palantir’s technology has been used to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and beyond, including many who had nothing to do with Hamas, had no control over its actions, and often weren’t even alive when it won local elections in 2006 and began to administer Gaza.
There should be no question that Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 was unconscionable. Still, for Israel to react by killing more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a relatively conservative figure that even the Israeli government now acknowledges, constitutes a grossly disproportionate response that most independent experts define as genocide. The idea that such mass slaughter can be justified as a way of scaring the bad guys and reducing violence is intellectually unsupportable and morally obscene.
So, welcome to the world of Alex Karp, one of the leaders of the new wave of techno-militarists in Silicon Valley.
Militarizing AI, or Techno-Optimism Run Amok
This is not your father’s military-industrial complex (MIC). The current stewards of the MIC—executives running industrial giants like Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—are far more circumspect in what they have to say than Karp. Their leaders may occasionally make a statement about how increased tensions in the Middle East or Asia could generate demands for their products among US allies in those regions, but they would never engage in the sort of nakedly Orwellian rhetoric Karp seems to specialize in.
Still, the MIC of the future augurs not just a change in technology or business practices, but—as Karp suggests—a potential culture shift in which militarism is openly celebrated, without the need for any cover language about promoting global stability or defending a “rules-based international order.” Think of the new MIC as a rugged individualist, high-tech version of philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” And those running it want us to believe that the only way to “win” a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings headed up by the likes of Alex Karp, Palantir Founder Peter Thiel, Anduril head Palmer Luckey, and the inimitable Elon Musk.
Alex Karp has co-authored a book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, in which he articulates his vision of what it will supposedly take to make America globally dominant again. The book is a long lament about how most Americans have lost their sense of purpose and patriotism, frittering away their time in trivial pursuits like reality TV and video games. He and co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska call for a new unifying national mission to whip this nation of slackers into shape and restore the United States to its rightful place as the world’s unrivaled political and military power.
Karp’s answer to what’s needed: a new Manhattan Project (which, in case you don’t remember, produced the atomic bomb to end World War II). This time, the focus would not be on developing nuclear weapons but on accelerating the military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and giving the United States a permanent technological advantage over China. It’s hard to imagine a more impoverished or misguided vision of America’s future, or one more drained of basic humanity.
Hawks, traditional realists, and techno-militarists will, of course, deride any humanity-first approach to foreign and domestic policy as naive, but in reality, it’s the new wave militarists who are the truly naive ones. After squandering trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives on the wars of this century—wars that failed to reach their advertised objectives by a long shot (just as the most recent one in Iran is sure to do), while making the world a significantly more dangerous place—they still mouth platitudes about pursuing “peace through strength” and using US military power to undergird a “rules-based international order.” Given the American losses in this century to far more poorly funded and less technologically sophisticated adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, such tired rhetoric is beginning to sound like a cruel joke, or indeed the gasps of the representatives of a declining empire.
Will Technowar Be Cheaper, and Will It Protect Us?
Putting ideology aside for a moment, there is the narrower question of whether the emerging tech firms can truly produce better systems of war making for less money. Palmer Luckey of Anduril—a protégé of Palantir founder Peter Thiel—made headlines recently when he told an interviewer from CNBC that the US could spend perhaps half of the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget and still have a more effective defense system if it simply stopped buying the “wrong things.”
The idea that a weapons contractor would offer to do more for less seems almost revolutionary in an age where greed and corruption in the MIC continue to run rampant. The philosophy behind Luckey’s statement to CNBC is, in fact, encapsulated in a remarkable Anduril document entitled “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” a scathing critique of the current business practices of the Pentagon and mammoth military contractors like Lockheed Martin.
Luckey’s manifesto should be considered an assault on the top five arms conglomerates—led by Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon)—that now receive 1 out of every 3 contract dollars doled out by the Pentagon. Those huge firms have had their day, the essay suggests, doing necessary and useful work in the long-gone Cold War years of the last century. “Why can’t the existing defense companies simply do better?” it asks. “…These companies work slowly, while the best engineers relish working at speed…These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of our defense.”
What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry.
The document all but suggests that companies like Lockheed Martin should be given a lifetime achievement award and then shoved out of the way, so the likes of Thiel, Karp, Luckey, and Musk can take the helm of the arms industry.
But spending less on weapons—as useful as it would be given other urgent national priorities—can’t be the only goal of defense policy. The most important question is whether purportedly cheaper, more nimble, more accurate AI-driven systems can, in fact, be deployed in a way that would promote peace and stability rather than yet more war. In reality, there is a danger that, if the United States thinks it can use such systems to intervene militarily on a routine basis while suffering fewer casualties, the temptation to go to war might actually increase.
Even given all of the above, the idea of breaking the stranglehold of the big contractors on the development and production of the US arsenal is an attractive one. But the tech sector’s claims that it can do the job better for less remains to be proven. A drone is cheaper than an F-35 jet fighter for sure, but what about swarms of drones that are used in waves and replenished rapidly in the midst of a war, or unpiloted ships and armored vehicles that run on complex, unproven software that could well fail at crucial moments? And what if, as the tech sector and its growing cadre of lobbyists would prefer, the new age militarists are allowed to operate with little or no scrutiny, with a weakening of safeguards like independent testing and curbs on price gouging—safeguards that are already too weak to fully get the job done?
When President Ronald Reagan negotiated arms control agreements with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the last century, his motto was “trust but verify.” In the case of Palantir and its ilk, perhaps the motto should be “mistrust and verify.” We need to get beyond their marketing slogans and make them prove that their new tech can work as advertised and is indeed better than what came before. If so, then Palantir and Anduril should be treated as vendors and paid for their services, but with no right to attempt to shape our military budget or foreign policy, much less the fundamental workings of our already stumbling democracy.
The Military Tech Lobby: Disruptors on Steroids
Before the current surge of weapons development in the tech sector, there was a time when some Silicon Valley firms acted as if their products were so superior and affordable that they didn’t need to dirty their hands with traditional lobbying. Unrealistic as that might have been, Silicon Valley has now gone all-in on legalized corruption—from carefully targeted campaign contributions to hiring former government officials to do their bidding. Example number one is, of course, Vice President JD Vance, who was employed, mentored, and financed by—yes!—Palantir founder Peter Thiel during his rise to the Senate and then to the vice presidency. When he was selected for Donald Trump’s ticket in 2024, a flood of new money came into the campaign from the military-tech sector, including tens of billions of dollars from Elon Musk. Once on the ticket, one of Vance’s main jobs proved to be extracting even more donations from the Silicon Valley militarists.
Then came Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the organization that gave efficiency a dreadful name by cutting federal programs and personnel seemingly at random and gutting essential tools like the Agency for International Development (USAID) while leaving the Pentagon virtually untouched. Although USAID had its problems, it also funded essential development and public health efforts globally that sustained millions of people. An actual efficiency drive would have looked at what worked and what didn’t at that agency. Instead, Musk’s acolytes, who knew nothing about economic assistance, simply dismantled it.
There are now significant numbers of Silicon Valley executives in key positions in the Trump administration, led by Vance but including dozens of others in key posts in the military, the top leadership of the Pentagon, and across a range of domestic and foreign-policy agencies.
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what’s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.
Coming Down to Earth (and Reining in the Technophiles)
The problem with the new techno-militarists isn’t that they’re mistaken about technology’s power, but that they’re dangerously wrong about who should wield it, to what ends, and under what constraints. Power without restraint is not innovation. It is recklessness dressed up as inevitability. A growing share of the tools that shape American foreign and domestic security policy is being designed, deployed, and promoted by a small group of private actors whose incentives are aggressively financial, whose worldviews are profoundly militarized, and whose accountability to the public is minimal at best.
What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry. In reality, we’ve heard this story before—from Cold War nuclear strategists, Vietnam-era body-count enthusiasts, and the architects of the “shock and awe” doctrine that helped destroy Iraq. Each generation is promised that this technology (whatever it might be) will finally make war, American-style, clean, precise, and decisive. Each time, the bodies pile up anyway.
What makes today’s moment especially dangerous is the speed and opacity with which such systems are being developed and deployed. AI-enabled targeting tools, predictive surveillance platforms, autonomous weaponry, and data-fusion systems are all being integrated into the military and domestic policing structures with minimal public debate, weak oversight, and virtually no meaningful consent from the people who will live with—and die from—the consequences. The rhetoric of AI-driven disruption has become a convenient excuse for bypassing democratic processes altogether.
If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates.
The underlying premise of the techno-militarists is that permanent war is the natural state of our world and our only choice is how efficiently we decide to wage it. In reality, security is never produced by terrifying the rest of the planet into submission. It’s produced by diplomacy; restraint; adhering to international law and economic justice; and the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions that make mass violence less likely rather than more automated.
Alex Karp and his peers may see themselves as realists, bravely saying what others don’t dare to say. In truth, theirs is a brittle, nihilistic worldview that mistakes domination for strength and innovation for wisdom. Humanity deserves more than an endless arms race run by men (and they are almost all men!) who believe that they alone are fit to decide whose lives are expendable. The brave new war machine’s version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World should frighten us all.
If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates. The alternative is to surrender our moral agency to a handful of self-anointed visionaries and hope they get it right. History suggests that is a gamble we can’t afford to take.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular