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.
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.