There are ‘wish lists,’ and there are ‘opportunities to spend’ that go beyond
Like the weather, everyone complains about Pentagon spending and mismanagement, but no one does anything about it. Leaders of the world’s most expensive military have refused to conduct or failed to complete every internal financial audit since Congress first demanded such accountability in the 1990s. The Department of Defense owns over 70% of the nation’s assets and can’t account for half of them. In fairness, military brass has had plenty of enablers in its failures to tame wild and sometimes blindfolded spending, with a special boost from political leaders who consistently block reform.
Although the Pentagon budget has grown by 50% over the last 10 years, President Trump wants to add another 12% to the Pentagon’s budget for fiscal year 2026, a move that for the first time will boost defense spending to over $1 trillion.
That number will almost certainly end up higher because, by law, no matter how generous the president’s request is, the Pentagon is required to ask Congress for even more money. The chief of staff of each military branch must put together an unfunded priority list – nicknamed a “wish list” – requesting money for items not included in the president’s budget.
This has been routine since the 1990s, and the procedure became federal law in 2017. The lists don’t need to include lengthy justifications of why the money is needed, as is the case for most budget requests to Congress.
These “Dear Santa” letters totaled at least $30.8 billion in fiscal year 2025, $17 billion in 2024, and $21.5 billion in 2023. Some of the items the Defense Department “wished” for in those three years include:
The practice persists even though the Defense Department isn’t always happy about it. The Biden administration’s Pentagon Comptroller, Mike McCord, publicly supported ending the requirement. He wrote in a 2023 letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that unfunded priority lists are “not an effective way to illuminate our top priorities.”
The opportunities to spend go beyond even the wish lists. Members of Congress often add “Congressional increases” to the Pentagon budget – de facto earmarks for programs neither the president nor Pentagon officials thought were important enough to include even in their dream spending plans.
Congressional increases added at least $22.7 billion to the military budget in 2024. The dollar total is likely even higher because the public report lists only increases of $20 million or more. Auditors at the government watchdog group Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the missing information, but were told that no record exists.
The largest single addition last year was $1.8 billion for the Navy to buy ten extra planes. Other add-ons have little direct connection to defense, such as $110 million for prostate cancer research.
Although Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency to signal his commitment to reducing and streamlining government, the president is sending mixed signals on Pentagon spending. On the one hand, the president said in an April 9 executive order that he wanted the Defense Department to compile a list of programs more than 15% behind schedule or 15% over cost so they can be assessed for possible cancellation. The (soft) deadline was last week.
At the same time, however, Trump has been receptive to the complaints of lawmakers like Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who lamented in February that defense spending was “near record lows as a percentage of our gross domestic product, and all aspects of our military forces are now in dire need of repair or replacement.” (Defense spending in 2023 was 3.4% of GDP, in line with the last 10 years but well below the Reagan-era high of 6.8% in 1982, before the end of the Cold War.)
Trump’s planned increase of the military budget would go a long way to wiping out the $160 billion that DOGE claims it’s saved taxpayers with its government-wide cost cuts.
The added resources don’t mean the military is getting stronger or better at equipping its warfighters. It means there’s more bureaucracy to feed. In 2000, the Defense Department spent roughly $150 billion on its active personnel, adjusted for inflation.
