Shameful Trillion Dollar Pentagon Budget Clears the House
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. House today passed its annual defense policy bill for FY 2026. The bill authorizes $883 billion for defense discretionary spending on top of the $150 billion in additional military spending from the July reconciliation package, bringing total Pentagon spending to more than $1 trillion for the first time in U.S. history. Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, released the following statement:
“Throwing a trillion dollars at the Pentagon – an agency replete with waste and fraud – at the same time the Republican Congress and the Trump regime are slashing spending on health care, education, housing, food assistance and foreign aid is a disgraceful and unconscionable misuse of taxpayer money.
“On top of the age-old dangerous and wasteful spending, the bill pours billions into new boondoggles like Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ space interceptor vanity project and supercharges the dangerous development of killer robots for the battlefield.
“Making it still worse is the administration’s in-your-face, authoritarian misuse of Pentagon dollars – from the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of Washington, D.C., to the illegal and murderous attack on a Venezuelan boat.
“The bill includes some modest, positive requirements to report waste, fraud, and price gouging to Congress and establishes financial penalties if the Pentagon fails its audit. But these small measures do not begin to offset the damage done by the dangerous and wasteful overall package.”