The White House is seeking a record-shattering Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion for the next fiscal year, the largest year-over-year increase in a presidential military spending request since World War II. The United States already has the world’s largest military budget at roughly $1 trillion, more than the combined budgets of the next nine highest-spending countries. The Trump administration’s budget request includes funding for F-35 stealth fighter jets, new warships and President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, among other priorities.

“All it means is buying more weapons for more,” says Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen. “It’s beyond the wildest dreams of the military-industrial complex.” The budget proposal also includes deep cuts to social programs.

We also speak with Josh Paul, a former State Department official involved in arms sales who resigned in 2023 over Israel-Palestine policy. He notes that the $1.5 trillion figure does not even include the costs of the Iran war. “It’s just a vast amount of money in a way that is reckless by an administration that is corrupt,” says Paul.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

The White House has unveiled a record-shattering Pentagon budget request of one-and-a-half trillion dollars for the next fiscal year. It’s by far the largest year-over-year increase in a presidential military spending request since World War II. It includes funding for F-35 stealth fighter jets, new warships, including Virginia-class submarines, and Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, which the White House says will cost $185 billion to boost U.S. ship building, raise salaries for troops and AI development in the military.

This is President Trump at a White House event last week ahead of the budget proposal announcement.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis; you can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Critics have slammed Trump’s budget proposal for continuing to funnel taxpayer money to increase U.S. military spending for Israel’s wars on Gaza, Iran and Lebanon. Last month, Senator Bernie Sanders filed three joint resolutions of disapproval in an attempt to block the sale of U.S. bombs, worth over $660 million, to Israel. This is Senator Sanders speaking with MS NOW host Chris Hayes.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: The bottom line is that to give another 20,000 bombs to a country which committed genocide in Gaza happens to be, among many other things — forget the moral issue — happens to be in violation of American law. You don’t sell arms, according to American law, to countries that violate international law and human rights. Clearly, Israel has done that. Israel talked. Netanyahu, who for 40 years has wanted a war with Iran, finally got a president to go along with him.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by two people. We start with Josh Paul, veteran State Department official who resigned in 2023 under the Biden administration to protest the push to increase arms sales to Israel for its war on Gaza. He’s now a director at A New Policy, the lobbying group he co-founded with fellow resignee Tariq Habash to press for a change in U.S. policy on Palestine and Israel.

Josh, thanks for joining us again. The Trump administration first declared an emergency soon after the U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran to bypass Congress on more than 20,000 bombs to Israel. You resigned over the push to increase arms sales during Israel’s war on Gaza. Can you give your perspective on the significance of over 20,000 more bombs potentially being delivered to Israel, and, overall, on this shattering one-and-a-half-trillion-dollar military budget?

JOSH PAUL: Yes. Thank you, Amy.

So, let’s start with that $1.5 trillion budget, which doesn’t include, let’s be clear, funding for the current Iran war. That will come in a further supplemental. So it’s a vast amount of money, and ultimately leveraged against the U.S. debt. We are spending our children’s money to take the lives of other people’s children. That’s what it boils down to. It’s just a vast amount of money in a way that is reckless by an administration that is corrupt.

When we look at this new weapons sales, these new weapons sales to Israel, 20,000 1,000-pound bombs, coming out of, let’s be clear, as well, U.S. stocks — a lot of these weapons are not going to be built afresh; they’re going to be transferred out of the U.S. stocks. And then President Trump will, if he gets it, spend this money from the taxpayer and from our national debt to recuperate or to recoup ourselves for that. It is another burden, certainly, on the American people, but also on the world. At the end of the day, it is not just these bombs. There are also other weapons we have provided to Israel, including bulldozers, that are being used to destroy Palestinian homes in acts of collective punishment.

Senator Sanders will be bringing a vote next week to the floor of the Senate against the bombs, against these bulldozers. And I think it is vital that we see as many Democratic senators as possible vote to block those weapons — and, ideally, Republicans, as well, because this is in no one’s interest whatsoever.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Josh, you said that the Foreign Military Financing, or FMF, serves almost as a gift card for Israel to spend on weapons. Could you talk about the disproportion in military aid specifically to Israel that the United States has had historically compared to other countries in the world?

JOSH PAUL: So, Israel has always been by far the largest recipient of U.S. military grant assistance. In President Trump’s budget request, the provision to Israel of U.S. funding comprises 63% of the global available total. People keep asking, “Why do we keep getting pulled back into wars in the Middle East? What about this rebalance to Asia?” Well, when you’re spending the majority of your global funding in Israel and in the region, in the Middle East, of course you’re going to keep getting pulled back. We are not getting pulled back to the Middle East. We are anchored to it as a function of our own funding to Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And —

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, go ahead, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I just want to say, last month, the State Department approved potential arms sales to three Middle East countries worth more than $23 billion. Talk about this aid to countries like the UAE, Kuwait and Jordan.

JOSH PAUL: So, this isn’t aid; this is sales. But the Trump administration used an emergency authority. These cases were already sitting under congressional review, and Congress had questions, both about the arms sales to Israel and about the arms sales to the UAE — the UAE, of course, being involved right now, or supporting, the genocide that is occurring in Sudan. The administration, I think, very cynically, used the current war with Iran to essentially say, “OK, we’re declaring an emergency. We’re not going to answer any more questions from Congress about these human rights abuses, about these risks, and we are just going to move these forward.” So, a very cynical, very disturbing use of the existing authorities.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go to Rob Weissman, I wanted to ask you — four astronauts are part of the NASA Artemis II crew, became the furthest humans from Earth in all of history officially, as they began their trajectory, which they just finished, around the dark side of the moon. Trump’s budget plans to cut 23% of NASA’s budget, $3.6 billion cut to the agency’s science unit, which could cancel 40 programs. Can you talk about all of these budget cuts across federal agencies and how it’s a path for further privatization of the federal government?

JOSH PAUL: Yeah. So, first of all, I think we can all think of a few or four other people that we would rather be the furthest they could be from the Earth.

So, what Trump is doing is essentially creating an opportunity for SpaceX, in particular, and for other major companies that have close relationships with the White House to essentially privatize space, to continue to advance through the defense budget President Trump’s, as he sees it, national security role and to militarize space, but then to cut the civilian side of the funding in order to allow profit-seeking companies, the private sector, essentially, to build up its role there, as well. So, it’s a lose-lose, both for science and for humanity.

AMY GOODMAN: So, “a moral obscenity.” That’s what Public Citizen and nearly 300 other groups nationwide are calling the budget. They’re urging Congress to reject Trump’s budget proposal, which could cut billions of dollars in social programs for education, healthcare, climate and affordable housing. The White House budget request also continues to aggressively slash federal programs Trump has decried as, quote-unquote, “woke,” aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI. For more, we’re also going to Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, his group just releasing a statement titled “Trump’s Budget Proposal Is a Moral Obscenity.”

Rob, thanks again for joining us. Lay out what is not being funded, what is being cut.

ROBERT WEISSMAN: Yeah, well, I think we’ve got to look at these two things simultaneously: a $500 billion increase, a 50% increase in the Pentagon budget, and a roughly $100 billion proposed cut for everything else.

So, the everything else that’s going to be cut includes some of the items you were talking about, includes funding for education, includes funding for healthcare, huge investments in science, biomedical science, all kinds of sciences, including the NASA program you were talking about, and, of course, cuts for programs to help the poor and vulnerable, because that’s what Trump and Russ Vought prioritize. Those cuts are not likely to go through. The Congress is not going to agree to them. However, to some extent, they reflect what Trump is actually doing in refusing to spend money that Congress has appropriated.

On the other side is a $500 billion proposed increase for the Pentagon, and Congress is going to take that seriously. So, $500 billion, it’s beyond the wildest dreams of the military-industrial complex. All it means is buying more weapons for more war.

But if you stop and think about what can we do with $500 billion, if we had the political will, which Trump says he has for war spending — if we had the political will for peace spending, what could we do? Well, we could restore all of the cuts to Medicaid and food assistance in Trump’s prior bill. We could expand Medicare to cover dental, health and vision. We could have universal care for children zero to four. We could double the budget for the EPA. We could invest in affordable housing and end homelessness in the United States. We could restore and expand all of the foreign assistance that’s been cut, which public health experts say will lead to the deaths of millions by 2030. We could invest all of that and more — not one of those things, all of those things and more — with this $500 billion.

So, it is a moral obscenity both for what it proposes to spend and for what it shows we could do but are refusing to do because we don’t have the political will.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Rob Weissman, in terms of what it proposes to spend, it’s an astounding amount of money. In addition to the fact that Trump has been pushing the NATO countries to increase their military spending, which will, of course, rebound back to American arms manufacturers, and the need of the Gulf states to increase their military spending because of the war that he embarked on here with Iran, what does President Trump propose to spend this increase on?

ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, the details matter, but I have to say I don’t think they really know. This amount is so large, they’re just throwing a giant number out there. We saw in the last tax and budget reconciliation bill $150 billion extra going to the Pentagon. And the Pentagon made a desperate effort to try to spend as much as it could in September, because they were running out of time, according to their own timetable, and they were just throwing it everywhere they could.

I think two things that are worth teasing out that they’re looking to do, one is the president’s “Golden Dome” project, which is a kind of a revitalization of what used to be known as Star Wars, an alleged AI-driven system to provide protection against ballistic missile attacks on the United States, which is impossible to achieve, according to scientists, but which is projected out to spending over many years at trillions of dollars, and then a massive new increase of investment in the nuclear program, to invest in more nuclear weapons rather than just decommissioning the ones that we have on hand.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you could talk about the White House calling on Congress to approve a significant portion of its proposed military spending increase using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process, which would allow Republicans to approve the budget without any Democratic support, Rob? Explain in the lay terms what’s going on here.

ROBERT WEISSMAN: Yeah, so, it can sound tricky, but it’s pretty straightforward. They’re proposing this preposterous increase of $500 billion, by the way, on top of a trillion-dollar budget that should be cut, because it’s already vastly more than you need to spend, and this is an agency, the Pentagon, that can’t pass an audit, that is the center of waste and fraud in the federal government. It should easily be cut by $200 billion. But they’re proposing a $500 billion increase. That’s a lot. Democrats aren’t going to agree to that.

So, their proposal is the majority of that should be funded through this special process that you’re referencing, the reconciliation process, that cannot be filibustered and could be driven through just by a majority of Republicans in the — or, by a totality of the Republicans in the Senate. So, it’s a way to get around the normal appropriations process, which requires some bipartisan agreement. It would mean that if they do $350 billion without the filibuster, the rest of the budget is kind of a trick. So, if you think you’re passing just a $1.1 trillion Pentagon budget, you’re actually passing a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, because they plan to do the rest of it without Democratic agreement.

And just to make it even worse, to add on to the point that Josh made, this does not include the additional $200 billion they’re going to seek to fund and expand the Iran war. So this is separate from the Iran war funding. If you add that in, the Pentagon budget will be up at $1.7 trillion.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have about 20 seconds left. What is Public Citizen calling for now?

ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, absolute no, not another dollar for the war, not an extra dollar for the Pentagon. We want cuts. But right now the priority is to stop this from going through. And we think that is achievable, as you juxtapose these numbers with what — the tweets you were reading from the cartoon villain president threatening to destroy civilizations. He doesn’t need a penny more to engage in the lunatic behavior he’s trying to inflict on the rest of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Rob Weissman, we want to thank you for being with us, co-president of Public Citizen. Their recent statement is headlined “Trump’s Budget Proposal Is a Moral Obscenity.” And I want to thank Josh Paul, veteran State Department official who resigned in 2023 under the Biden administration to protest the push to increase arms sales to Israel amidst its assault on Gaza, and now slamming the military budget that’s being proposed.

Happy birthday, Matthew Ealy!

That does it for our show. I’ll be speaking tonight at the Green Music Center at Sonoma State University in California. That’s at 7:30 tonight at Weill Hall. Juan will be speaking on Thursday and Friday here in New York City at the CUNY Grad Center, at the Latinx Freedom Conference.

Democracy Now! currently accepting applications for our development associate position. Go to our website at democracynow.org.

I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, for another edition of Democracy Now!

Media that fights fascism

Truthout is funded almost entirely by readers — that’s why we can speak truth to power and cut against the mainstream narrative. But independent journalists at Truthout face mounting political repression under Trump.

We rely on your support to survive McCarthyist censorship. Please make a tax-deductible one-time or monthly donation.