U.S. President Donald Trump has signed off on the first-ever trillion-dollar military budget.
When the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its budget request for fiscal year 2026 in May, it included a base defense request of $892.6 billion, plus a $119.3 billion allocation of additional resources from the Republican-controlled Congress’s budget reconciliation bill.
On July 4, Trump signed the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” which, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, solidified the $1 trillion defense budget.
The act also cuts funding for Medicaid and food stamps, and mandates tax cuts for Corporate America and the wealthy, thus adding $3.4 trillion to the national debt, according to a Congressional study.[1]
Subsidizing “an emerging military and nuclear technology wish list,” the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” allocates $12.8 billion for Trump’s Golden Dome initiative, a promised missile defense shield modeled after Reagan’s ill-conceived Strategic Defense Initiative (ie. Star Wars).
$29 billion is further allocated to enhance Pentagon resources for domestic shipbuilding, $1 billion to secure the southern border, and tens of billions for autonomous weapons, and an expansion of nuclear-weapon modernization and space capabilities.
Additionally, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” allocates $12 billion to the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command, $2 billion for the National Defense Stockpile Transaction Fund to improve the U.S. stockpile of critical minerals, $500 million for high-altitude surveillance balloons, and a $1.2 billion increase in funding for cruise missiles, among other things.
A new study issued by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, written by William Hartung and Stephen Semler, Profits of War: Top Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020-2024, found that the U.S. government invested more than twice as much money in five weapons companies in that period as in diplomacy and international assistance.
The five companies that received $771 billion between 2020 and 2024 were: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion).
The above companies have benefited from tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel and Ukraine, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. U.S. military aid to Israel was more than $18 billion in just the first year following October 7 2023; military aid to Ukraine has totaled $65 billion since 2022.
A surge in foreign-funded arms sales to European allies, paid for by the recipient nations—more than $170 billion in 2023 and 2024 alone—has provided additional revenue to arms contractors over and above the funds they receive directly from the Pentagon.
Annual U.S. military spending has grown significantly this century amidst the backdrop of the Global War on Terror and new Cold War.
The Pentagon’s discretionary budget—the annual funding approved by Congress and the large majority of its overall budget—rose from $507 billion in 2000 to $843 billion in 2025 (in constant 2025 dollars), a 66% increase. Additional supplemental funding that has raised the military budget to the $1 trillion mark pushes the increase to 99%.
According to Profits of War, the shape of what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” is shifting as military technology companies are being awarded an increasing share of the Pentagon’s budget and gaining in political power.
Companies like SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril have been tapped for multi-billion-dollar contract awards from the Pentagon for communications, surveillance, targeting, unpiloted vehicles, anti-drone defenses, and hypersonic weapons, and should be pushed into the top ranks of Pentagon contractors in the near future.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM are additionally splitting $10 billion for the Pentagon’s cloud-computing program.
Silicon Valley tech companies are transforming the nature of war through their development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and robotic weaponry that reduces the human imprint and political costs of waging war.
The outsized influence of Big Tech companies is apparent in the appointment of SpaceX founder Elon Musk as de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Vice President J. D. Vance’s close ties to Palantir founder Peter Thiel.
Stephen Feinberg, second-in-charge at the Pentagon, worked for Cerberus Capital, an investment firm which has a history of investing in the gun and military industries, and Michael Obadal, a senior director at Anduril, has been appointed Under Secretary of the Army.
Profits of War notes that the ongoing influence of the arms industry over Congress operates through tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and the employment of 950 lobbyists, as of 2024.
Further, military contractors shape military policy and lobby to increase military spending by funding think tanks and serving on government commissions.
While President Joe Biden touted the arms industry and its workers as the “arsenal of democracy,” a significant share of U.S. arms transfers, according to Profits of War, go to undemocratic regimes or nations at war.
Since 2019, U.S. arms were possessed by one or more parties to 28 conflicts, and 31 U.S. arms clients were deemed “not free” by Freedom House.
In 2022, the Biden administration approved arms sales to 57% of the world’s autocracies, based on data from the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, and the Varieties of Democracy project.
Under a new version of the “revolving door,” ex-military officers and senior Pentagon officials are increasingly taking up jobs with venture capital firms that invest in Silicon Valley arms-industry startups.
An investigation by Eric Lipton of The New York Times found that at least 50 former Pentagon officials went to work for military-related venture capital or private equity firms in the five years from 2019 to 2023.
Profits of War paints a damning picture of an ascendant fascism in the U.S., whose governing structure is thoroughly dominated by war profiteers and their agents.
The report concludes that there needs to be “greater congressional and public scrutiny of emerging weapons contractors” and that “the role of Silicon Valley startups and the venture capital firms that support them needs to be better understood and debated” as “the U.S. crafts a new foreign policy strategy that avoids unnecessary wars.”
For the latter to be achieved, there needs to be much greater pushback from the peace movement, which needs to go beyond mere opposition to this or that conflict and to develop a strategy for transforming the U.S. economy along more peaceful lines.[2]
Additionally, it needs to create a plan for educating Middle America about the cancerous nature of the military-industrial complex, whose awesome power is a threat to us all.
The act additionally cuts federal subsidies to clean energy industries. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) called the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” a “death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans throughout the country.” ↑
See the concluding chapter of my book, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019). ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
