Pentagon Reportedly So Awash With Cash It Doesn’t Even Know How To Spend It

President Donald Trump’s administration has yet to finalize how to allocate the more than half-trillion-dollar increase in U.S. military spending proposed in the White House’s budget, according to The Washington Post.

In January, Trump approved Department of War (DoW) Secretary Pete Hegseth’s request to raise defense spending to $1.5 trillion for Fiscal Year 2027, up from $900 billion the previous year—a record at the time. The decision, however, drew scrutiny from several administration officials, including Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought, who is known for his focus on controlling deficits, the report said, citing four anonymous sources.

White House and Pentagon staff are reportedly facing logistical challenges in determining how to distribute the massive 50% increase from FY2026 to FY2027. Sources told The Washington Post that these complications have caused the White House to fall more than two weeks behind schedule in submitting its proposed budget to Congress.

Requests for comment from the DoW and OMB to the Daily Caller News Foundation were not immediately returned. Retired Marine Corps Col. Mark Cancian told the Post that it is a “head-scratcher” that Hegseth’s Pentagon requested such a large budget increase while also expressing a desire to reduce U.S. military presence outside the Western Hemisphere.

“If you’ve got a 50 percent budget increase, you don’t have to do any of that. You’d be talking about all the new places you’d be making investments,” Cancian added. He now serves as a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan foreign policy think tank.

The White House’s proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget for FY2027 far exceeds a Democratic Party Medicare expansion program, which is estimated at $350 billion, according to The Washington Post.

Hegseth promoted the proposed budget increase during a January visit to Lockheed Martin employees. “We are rebuilding the arsenal of freedom,” the War Secretary told the defense contractor’s workforce. “We had a historic budget last year. I don’t know if you saw, the president announced the goal of $1.5 trillion for our national defense budget in 2027. That is a message to the world.”

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