Trump’s Military Budget Request by the (Mind-Blowing) Numbers

It’s pretty rare for us to say that Donald Trump is a man of his word, but only a few hours after saying that the federal government can’t take care of things like daycare, Medicare, and Medicaid because it has to pay for “military protection,” he proposed a budget that would massively increase defense spending to $1.5 trillion in the 2027 fiscal year while cutting a wide range of domestic programs by tens of billions of dollars.

Obviously, those are some huge numbers. So big, in fact, that most Americans don’t have a concept of the sums of money we are talking about here.

So we thought we would illustrate it in a way that people could understand.

If Congress appropriates the entire $1.5 trillion, that would be about as much as the military budgets of the next 40 top defense-spending countries combined.

How does that compare to Iran, you ask? Well, its annual military budget is about $8 billion, so the supplemental appropriations bill covering the cost of Trump’s war will be 25 times as much while the total fiscal year 2027 budget would be nearly 200 times as much.

While there is no doubt that the US is dominating the conflict militarily, that’s hardly a surprise considering that, in its entire history, Iran probably hasn’t spent $1 trillion on its defense (to be fair, when you index its military expenditures from the past 2,500 year for inflation, you’d probably get there).

However, so as not to blow the minds of our readers, here are some ways to  look at that $441 billion increase that Trump wants (not counting the $200 billion on top for the current war).

If you converted that to $100 bills and lined them all up, you’d get to the moon and (almost back).

Instead of giving that money to the DOD, if you held a raffle and gifted $1 million to a random American every single day, it would take more than a thousand years until it would be all gone.

Last year, we learned that former Fox News morning show host and current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth paid a woman $50,000 to make her sexual assault claim go away.

For $441 billion, he could sexually assault every one of the 8 million people in New York City and give each of them $50,000. If he assaults one person per hour, it would take him until the year 3030 to finish.

You could also eliminate world hunger for about five years.

Or, of course, you could give every man, woman, and child in the country $1,260. And that’s just for the increase. If you decided not to fund the DOD for one year, every taxpayer would save about $10,000 (obviously, businesses also pay taxes, but you catch our drift).

Oh, and about that thing Trump said, he is right. You can’t fund it all if you want to shell out $1.5 trillion for the DOD – which is why he is proposing severe cuts to (or the elimination of) programs such as Food for Education, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, K-12 grant programs, green energy initiatives, teen pregnancy prevention, Low Income Home Energy Assistance, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, community development block grants, occupational safety and health training grants, global health and humanitarian assistance initiatives, National Endowment for Democracy, climate research, and more than three dozen of NASA’s science missions.