The Pentagon always gets its billions. Families get deductibles, hunger and austerity. Hegseth’s war request exposes Washington’s corporate, people-last priorities.
Summary
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth returned to Congress demanding tens of billions more for an expanding war after the Pentagon had already consumed roughly $37.5 billion on the Iran conflict. At the same time, the administration dismantled humanitarian programs, abandoned lifesaving healthcare projects, disrupted American farm markets, and proposed a staggering $1.5 trillion military budget. Washington’s priorities could not be clearer: endless resources for destruction, austerity for human survival.
- Hegseth pressed Congress for nearly $90 billion in additional war-related funding, warning that military training and maintenance would suffer without another immediate infusion of public money.
- The administration’s assault on USAID halted food purchases, canceled agricultural grants, shut down university research programs, stranded supplies, and damaged markets that benefited American farmers and businesses.
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A major Lancet analysis estimated that sustained USAID defunding could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including more than 4.5 million children younger than five.
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The White House requested $1.5 trillion for the fiscal year 2027 defense budget, a roughly 42% increase over current funding, with more than half directed toward weapons, munitions, aircraft, ships, and other military hardware.
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China’s infrastructure-centered diplomacy offers an instructive contrast. World Bank research found that well-managed Belt and Road transportation projects can reduce trade costs, expand economic integration, and increase participating countries’ output—though such projects still require transparency, debt safeguards, and environmental protections.
A government that can mobilize billions overnight for bombing can mobilize billions to guarantee healthcare, end child poverty, rebuild schools, house the unhoused, and strengthen communities. The obstacle has never been a shortage of money. The obstacle is a political system that treats weapons manufacturers as indispensable while treating ordinary people as expenses.
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Billions for War, Austerity for the American People
Pete Hegseth went before Congress with the predictable message of every defense secretary presiding over an expanding war: Give the Pentagon more money, give it immediately, and do not ask too many difficult questions.
The secretary acknowledged that the war with Iran had already cost the United States approximately $37.5 billion. Yet the administration wanted Congress to approve tens of billions more—nearly $90 billion in additional war-related funding by some accounts—while warning that military training, maintenance, and readiness could suffer without an urgent cash infusion.
Notice how Washington operates when the military asks for money. Nobody demands that soldiers launch a bake sale. Nobody asks the Pentagon to establish a GoFundMe account. Nobody lectures generals about personal responsibility. Nobody says the country must wait until next year because the deficit is too high.
The money appears.
Congress borrows it. The Treasury creates the fiscal space. Politicians who suddenly become deficit hawks whenever a poor child needs food transform into spendthrift socialists for Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and the rest of the military-industrial complex.
That hypocrisy defines America’s political economy.
The government always finds money when powerful corporations stand ready to collect it. It finds money for bombs, missiles, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, surveillance systems, private military contractors, and wars with no measurable endpoint. But when working families demand universal healthcare, affordable housing, paid family leave, reliable public transit, tuition-free public college, or a serious assault on poverty, the political class asks, “How will we pay for it?”
That question is not economic. It is ideological.
The United States possesses the productive capacity, monetary sovereignty, technical expertise, and national wealth to guarantee basic human dignity. The country simply directs those resources toward the priorities chosen by its ruling economic class.
The contrast becomes even more obscene when one examines what the administration did to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
DOGE and the Trump administration treated USAID as wasteful charity for foreigners. They tore through programs with little understanding of the supply chains, contracts, healthcare networks, research institutions, and American agricultural markets connected to that work.
The consequences reached far beyond Washington bureaucracies.
The administration halted purchases of American wheat, soybeans, and other commodities used in food-aid programs. It canceled Food for Progress grants. It disrupted agricultural research at land-grant universities across 13 states. It left food sufficient to serve millions of people sitting in warehouses and at risk of spoilage.
That was not efficiency. It was economic vandalism.
American farmers lost buyers. University researchers lost funding. U.S. companies that supplied medicine, logistics, technology, nutrition, and healthcare services lost contracts. Workers lost jobs. Vulnerable people abroad lost food and treatment.
The administration presented cruelty as cost-cutting while quietly transferring even more national wealth into warfare.
Researchers have warned that the human toll could become catastrophic. A major study published in The Lancet estimated that continuing the USAID cuts could produce more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including more than 4.5 million children younger than five. The same research found that USAID-supported programs had helped prevent tens of millions of deaths during the previous two decades.
Those figures represent human beings, not abstractions.
They represent children who will die from preventable disease. Mothers who will die during childbirth. Patients who will lose HIV treatment. Families who will lose food during droughts and conflicts. Communities that will watch manageable outbreaks become epidemics because the clinics, medicines, and public-health workers disappeared.
America once claimed that its global power rested partly on generosity, public health, disaster relief, education, development, and partnership. That claim was always imperfect and often compromised by self-interest. Yet lifesaving aid still saved lives, built relationships, stabilized communities, and created economic ties.
Now the government appears determined to preserve only the most destructive component of American power.
The message to the world has become brutally simple: The United States will not reliably provide medicine, food, schools, wells, or development assistance—but it will always provide bombs.
That is not strength. It is imperial decay.
A country cannot bomb its way into genuine respect. It can force compliance temporarily. It can terrorize populations. It can destroy governments, infrastructure, and civilian life. But domination produces resentment, resistance, instability, and blowback.
The United States has spent decades proving that lesson in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and throughout the Middle East. Yet the military-industrial complex profits from repeated failure, so failure never disqualifies the policy.
Indeed, failure often becomes the justification for the next appropriation.
The Pentagon now seeks a fiscal year 2027 budget of $1.5 trillion, an increase of roughly 42% over current funding. The Defense Department itself says about 52% of the request would support weapons systems, munitions, aircraft, tanks, and ships. More than $750 billion would go toward developing military capabilities and procuring weapons.
Think about what $1.5 trillion represents.
It represents the ability to transform American life.
A fraction could expand community health centers, guarantee prenatal care, eliminate medical debt, fund tuition-free technical education, modernize public schools, build affordable housing, repair water systems, create clean-energy jobs, and rescue rural hospitals.
Instead, the political establishment treats those investments as unrealistic while describing a trillion-and-a-half-dollar war budget as necessary.
America should declare war on poverty with the same urgency it declares war on nations.
It should treat cancer, diabetes, maternal mortality, homelessness, addiction, hunger, failing infrastructure, and climate change as national-security emergencies. It should mobilize researchers, engineers, healthcare workers, educators, construction workers, and community organizations with the same financial commitment it gives military contractors.
Imagine a healthcare system funded with Pentagon logic.
A hospital administrator would testify that millions of Americans lacked care. Congress would authorize emergency funding that afternoon. Clinics would receive whatever resources they needed. No patient would face a deductible. No parent would lose a home because a child developed leukemia. No insurer would earn billions by denying treatment.
Instead, America operates a rationing system managed by profit-seeking corporations and calls it freedom.
The comparison with China deserves nuance, but it also deserves honesty.
China pursues its interests aggressively. Its overseas infrastructure initiatives can produce debt risks, environmental damage, opaque contracts, and political leverage. No progressive should romanticize any great power.
But China has also understood a strategic truth that Washington increasingly ignores: A nation can build influence by building things.
Through ports, railways, power systems, roads, telecommunications, and trade corridors, China creates relationships based on material development. World Bank research has concluded that well-designed Belt and Road transportation projects can reduce trade costs, deepen economic integration, and raise output in participating economies.
A bridge generates goodwill differently from a bomb crater.
A hospital creates a different memory than a drone strike.
A rail line can connect markets for generations. A missile destroys in seconds and often creates enemies for decades.
The United States could compete by becoming the world’s most reliable partner in clean energy, public health, climate resilience, food security, education, infrastructure, and technology transfer. It could strengthen alliances by helping countries become more prosperous and sovereign rather than forcing them into military dependence.
But that approach would distribute public resources broadly. The current system prefers policies that concentrate profits narrowly.
War functions as corporate welfare with patriotic branding.
Taxpayers fund the research. Taxpayers absorb the risk. Taxpayers pay for cost overruns. Private firms capture the profits. Executives receive bonuses. Investors receive dividends. And working-class families supply many of the soldiers sent into harm’s way.
Then, when veterans return home, Washington forces them to fight another battle for healthcare and benefits.
The cruelty circles back.
This country must reject the false choice between security and social investment. Healthcare is security. Housing is security. Clean water is security. Food is security. Education is security. A stable climate is security. A population free from medical bankruptcy is far more secure than one surrounded by expensive weapons but unable to afford insulin.
The question Americans should ask is not whether the country can afford universal healthcare or robust social programs.
The question is why the richest country on Earth continues to tolerate preventable suffering while feeding an apparatus of endless war.
Hegseth’s demand for billions provides the answer.
The money exists.
The political will exists.
The machinery of government can move rapidly.
It simply moves rapidly for the people and corporations that own the priorities.
A humane democracy must reverse those priorities. It must fund life with the urgency that today’s leaders fund death. It must build alliances through solidarity rather than coercion. It must measure national greatness not by how many countries it can destroy, but by how many lives it can improve.
Until that transformation occurs, every new war appropriation will expose the same moral indictment:
Washington never lacks money.
It lacks compassion, democratic accountability, and the courage to put people before profit.
