Pentagon officials are reportedly struggling to devise a plan to spend the extra $500 billion that Donald Trump wants to give the bloated, fraud-ridden agency in the next fiscal year, vindicating criticism of the funding proposal as immensely wasteful.
The Washington Post reported over the weekend that “White House aides and defense officials have run into logistical challenges surrounding where to put the money, because the amount is so large.”
The extra $500 billion, endorsed by the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, would push annual US military spending to a staggering $1.5 trillion after the Trump administration and congressional Republicans enacted unprecedented cuts to federal nutrition assistance and Medicaid last summer.
Is there an index fund of just defense contractors?
But there’s no money for public health, public education or anything that helps people.
Shit, I thought the US military budget was at $960 billion, not $1.5 trillion.
How about universal healthcare and a high speed rail network?
The really crazy part is when you look at it as a percentage of the budget and compare it to pre war levels. It isn’t what you think. In 2000 the budget was $304 billion, a total of 16.7% of the federal budget. Then 2 wars later of ballooning costs and it grew all the way up to $962 billion (the 2025 approved budget. Not counting the random $500 billion he is trying to add in). But this is now only 13.7% of thr total budget. Somehow the percentage has gone down.
Now, if you know numbers you should know that percentages get messy and are misleading to look at. The real question is what the fuck is going on with the giant ballooning budget that has gotten spending so out of control that this monstrous defense spending is now somehow a lower percentage than pre-war spending??? And the real kicker is that we are ballooning on spending, but none of it is going to actually helping the people paying the taxes! None of it is helping built up infrastructure, invest in education, build communities -nothing that helps build this country.
Trump is blowing through money and we doing even get anything out of it.
This is such a stupid way to frame it. The Pentagon would have no issue to (semi-reasonably) spend extra $50 trillion, if you give them 20 years to do it.
But most military factories are already busy pumping out equipment for Ukraine etc. And US shipyards are atrophied from underinvestment, plus no new ship designs are ready for production despite US Navy needing urgent modernization. So yes, if you tell the Pentagon to spend half a trillion in a year on short notice, that creates logistic issues. This will be true for pretty much any military, no matter how underfunded or overfunded. It does not telly you anything about whether the US military needs the money.
- Add lobster as topping choice for daily departmental pizza parties.
Just give it to Lockheed and Raytheon as a tip
They should spend it all on passing a financial audit, for once.
Accountability on their own activities? Good luck with that. They want surveillance on everyone else but would rather stay in the shadows themselves.
I can think of a few military contractors that would live a cool 500b
If returned to tax payers, this would mean a $3,030 payment for every single one of us.
That’d at least pay the rent one month in Trump’s economy.
Maybe a carton of eggs, even?
Give all of it to the army corps of engineers and build public transportation networks.
Rapid urban troop movers. Must be grade separated.
Someone should let them know that when it actually comes to war, railroads can be used to efficiently transport weaponry and vehicles
And the same railroads could be used for civilian transit when there’s no war
Rails can do that, yes. The thing is, the military is supposed to be used outside the US. Internal military rail networks only really good for putting down internal dissent and attacking neighbors.
No, it’s better to give the money to an agency focused on designing a rail network from an economic and transportation basis.
The military uses rails to move equipment for training, they also use rail for the vast amount of supplies required at installations and such.
I don’t care if they use it, I just don’t want them in charge of designing it.
The US Army Corps of Engineers have been designing, building, and maintaining public infrastructure for a very long time now.
what the fuck? a good idea??? get out
How much does a Battlestar Galactica cost, we’re gonna need one
So say we all
It’s one Battlestar Galactica, Michael. What could it cost?
10 cubits?
Hmm let’s give an extra $500 billion to an agency that has failed all of its financial audits…
Which, some how the Dodge waste fraud and abuse team, never seemed to get around to investigating… They claimed they would, but I guess were too busy gutting everything that was investigating musks companies before getting bored with it.
Don’t forget the canceling of any services that weren’t exclusively for white men.
What most people don’t understand is there can be $0 missing money at the same time…
It’s not one big pile of money, every agency has their own pile and much smaller piles.
So say Navy sent 10k to Norfolk and Norfolk used it. That balances to $0 logically.
If that 10k is late being sent between accounts, that’s a $20k discrepancy because it hits both ways instead of cancelling out, which isn’t logical but that how finances work. Missing 10k debit and 10k credit is still missing 20k even tho it balances out.
But, and I can’t stress this enough, saying the DoD is “an agency” just tells everyone who knows about this stuff, that you have no idea what you’re talking about. Some agencies fail their annuals, some have never failed a single one.
If you have questions, ask them. But please don’t just repeat talking points you don’t understand.
Why would we ask you questions? Do you work the GAO or something? Like what is this BS? DoD has a major accountability problem. Some of it is financial. Most of it is in their indiscriminate killing of civilians.
That is not how accounting works.
No…
That’s literally how accounting journals work…
Quick edit:
Like, this is day 1 accounting stuff, it doesn’t matter if it’s a positive or negative.
-20 and +20 add up to a 40 error.
Just like +20 and +20 does, or -20 and -20 does.
They all add up to the same amount of “missing” money.
Since about the 1500s we use double booking in bookkeeping, meaning the accounts look like that so that the balance sheet can balance and show 0 missing money. In most audits you don’t “summarise” error accounts, you check the balance accounts, statements and you check for why there’s stuff lying in the transaction accounts.
You should probably have stayed on a couple more days of your accounting class.
No. It’s literally not.
Did you sleep through class? Maybe have a dream where the professor told you to make up missing money?
This type of discrepancy is, wait for it, accounted for. It’s the point of bookkeeping. You know that money has been sent or received, you know how much you owe and how much you’re owed. A check in the mail isn’t going to cause a failed audit. 10,000 checks in the mail won’t cause a failed audit. You can look back over thousands of transactions and know, “oh, we normally get that check on the last Friday, it’s the last Monday, nothing to worry about yet.” Any auditor would also look at the history of payments and not account for money that’s not expected yet.
Stop going on the Internet and telling lies.
What an incredibly detailed and accurate way to dismiss the fact that, despite you clearly defining what accounting errors are, the Pentagon still can’t audit itself successfully and therefore shouldn’t be given more money.
way to dismiss the fact that
You…
You think clarification is dismissal?
I’m fine answering questions to help people understand this, but you don’t understand any of it and aren’t asking questions…
You have an opinion on what the conclusion should be, so you want to debate facts to make your conclusion appear to be the only option.
But all of that would be pointless because you’re choosing to remain willfully ignorant of how accounting ledgers actually work.
I just don’t have the time for that.
You think that them failing audits is my opinion? I think you missed the point and wrote an accurate yet completely unnecessary post.
TLDR: you made a highly accurate “welllll actually” post that did nothing to counter the OPs statement.
remember when they had to keep increasing the budget to sustain 2 war zones for decades and then when they pulled out of both Iraq and afganistan they…kept increasing the budget??? Where the fuck is the money going?
Into creating things that destroy rather than things that are good and last, because destruction lines the pockets of capitalists better.
Failed wunderwaffe projects and grift, but I repeat myself
Here’s an idea, give it back
