US President Donald Trump Announces Record-Billion Defense Budget
US President Donald Trump announced a record-high defense budget of around one billion US dollars, despite an ongoing campaign to cut federal spending. Trump made the unexpected announcement on Monday to a group of reporters in the Oval Office in Washington. In February, a directive was sent to the Pentagon, instructing a 5-year plan to cut the budget by 8 percent annually.
After a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, Trump told reporters, “We need to build our military and we are very fiscally responsible, but the military is something we need to build. And we need to be strong, because there are now many bad forces out there.”
The mentioned sum is “clearly higher” than the 892.5 billion dollars allocated by Congress for defense this year, according to Newsweek. Defense Minister Pete Hegseth stated in an initial reaction via posting on Monday, “The first billion-dollar budget of the Defense Ministry. President Donald Trump is rebuilding our military – and that’s FAST.”
Hegseth emphasized in his X-post that “we intend to spend every taxpayer dollar wisely – for lethal effect and readiness.” The announcement comes a few days after the Pentagon scandal surrounding Defense Minister Hegseth in the so-called chat-group affair. Hegseth and other government officials had discussed a military strike against the Huthi in Yemen on the Signal messenger, while a journalist had accidentally been invited to the group.
The defense minister under the previous administration of President Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin, had proposed increasing the US defense budget for the 2026 fiscal year by around 50 billion dollars more than initially planned. Trump did not specify whether the mentioned total is solely for the Pentagon or for the entire national defense budget, which also includes other agencies, according to Politico. The defense expenditures are expected to exceed 900 billion dollars in the coming budget, according to Politico.
Defense Minister Pete Hegseth had previously instructed high-ranking officials at the Pentagon and throughout the US military to develop plans for an 8 percent cut in the defense budget in each of the next five years, as revealed in a memo to the Washington Post and “officials familiar with the matter.” The memo includes a list of 17 categories to be exempted, including operations on the US-South border, the modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense and the procurement of submarines, one-way attack drones and other ammunition.
The current budget of the US Defense Ministry amounts to 895.2 billion dollars. Despite the enormous sums allocated for defense, the Pentagon has not conducted an internal audit in seven consecutive years since the introduction of the process. Trump’s promise to increase military funding comes at a time when his administration is carrying out far-reaching cuts in federal spending through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk. In the past few months, around 280,000 federal employees have been laid off under the DOGE.