The Hegseth budget: defense secretary’s $1.5tn ask reveals military-industrial chaos

Pete Hegseth testifies during a Senate appropriations committee hearing on Capitol Hill on 21 July 2026 in Washington DC. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Pete Hegseth testifies during a Senate appropriations committee hearing on Capitol Hill on 21 July 2026 in Washington DC. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Analysis The Hegseth budget: defense secretary’s $1.5tn ask reveals military-industrial chaos Aram Roston in Washington The Pentagon head proposed a 44% increase – to second world war levels – while ‘woke’ programs are gutted US politics live – latest updates When the ‘“department of government efficiency” was raging unchecked through the federal government in February 2025, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth , ordered his subordinates to find cuts of 8% a year for the next five years, theoretically trimming a total of $340m from the Pentagon budget. The disclosure briefly sent Palantir and defense stocks tanking – though soon the plan evaporated, as if it never existed. Instead, Hegseth is now demanding a $454bn increase for 2027 military spending, to a total of almost $1.5tn, in what he describes as a “generational investment”. House passes $1.15tn defense bill despite standoff over Israel and Trump’s voter agenda Read more Adjusted for inflation, that would for the first time match – and even exceed – US military spending at the height of the second world war during national mobilization, according to a chart prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The US defense budget is in what may be one of its messiest phases in recent memory. That’s because at the same time Donald Trump and Hegseth are making the push for the unprecedented increase in the defense budget – a 44% jump – they are also insisting on extracting emergency funding for the unpopular and disastrous war under way in Iran. The war all needs to be funded separately from the main Pentagon budget, which is why Hegseth is running in essence a two-pronged campaign on Capitol Hill: on the one hand, to cajole and bully Republicans to fund, for the relatively short term, the Iran war, and, on the other hand, to pour a historic amount of financing into the already vast military enterprise he presides over with his deputy, the private equity tycoon Stephen Feinberg . $75bn in spare change Hegseth and chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Dan Caine, faced a skeptical Senate appropriations committee on Tuesday in a hearing that was intended to focus on the Iran war part of the military budget push. Hegseth is asking for $67bn in emergency defense funds for his department for 2026. The ranking Democrat on the committee, Patty Murray, pointed out how much of the spending the Trump administration is asking for as an emergency seems uncorrelated to the flailing operations in Iran. “$800m for the national guard to patrol DC even longer,” she listed. “Over $1bn for the army to patrol the southern border, which is [the Department o