Remember the good old days when Trump said he’d get together with Putin and Xi and cut the defense budget in half? From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:
President Donald Trump last week announced new plans for a $1 trillion defense budget in 2026. Trump bragged about his big plans for spending ever larger amounts of taxpayer funds, stating at a meeting with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu that “We’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military … $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.” An increase in military spending to $1 trillion is a funding increase of more than $100 billion, or 12 percent. It would be the largest single-year increase since 2004, during the early years of the Iraq war.
Trump made no mention of earlier claims that his administration would cut overall federal spending while cutting the federal government’s annual deficit.
It’s easy to see why he wouldn’t mention those earlier promises. In recent days, Elon Musk has backtracked on his earlier promises that the Department of Government Efficiency would cut $1 trillion in federal spending in the near future. The new figure offered by Musk is only fifteen percent of that, or $150 billion. In other words, when it comes to spending, DOGE’s “savings” amount to about 2.2 percent of federal spending.
Things aren’t looking good for anyone who actually believed the administration’s promises to cut overall federal spending.
