The $1 trillion defense budget
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This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. And we are in our fourth day looking at the one big beautiful bill act, the budget reconciliation bill that contains some of the largest cuts to federal programs in those programs' history. There's also the proposed extension to the 2017 Trump tax cuts in the bill.

Now, thank you all for sending in your questions about the bill. I'm really glad you're doing that. And by the way, if you want to send us more questions, get the On Point Vox Pop app, wherever you get your apps. That's the best way to send us questions. Susan Cohen asked us to talk about the provision in the bill that would have stripped courts power to hold litigants in contempt. And the way that proposal had been worded, it could have allowed the government a way around following court orders.

Well, that proposal was in the House version of the budget bill. However, and for now at least, the Senate removed that language from the Senate version of the bill.

Instead, the Senate inserted a new section that reads, End quote. Translation?

In order to sue the government, specifically if plaintiffs are seeking a temporary injunction against, say, an executive order, plaintiffs would have to first post a bond that could be in the millions, even billions of dollars. And that bond would have to equal what the government would lose if the injunction were issued.

Carol Gauber in Spokane, Washington, asks us to cover the proposed sale of millions of acres of public lands that's in the bill. And Carol, not kidding, we were just talking about this in our editorial meeting yesterday, and it is on the list of future shows. OK, now one more thing before we get to today's topic about the bill. Just this week, at least three national polls were released that found of those Americans who have heard of the one big, beautiful bill,

It is very unpopular. 49% do not like the bill versus 29% who do, according to Pew Research. 42% oppose and 23% favor, according to the Washington Post. And 64% of people polled by KFF Health view the bill unfavorably versus 35% view the bill favorably.

And for folks who don't know much about the bill at all, it's highly likely, though, that you've at least heard of this. Waste, fraud, and abuse. Waste, fraud, and abuse. Waste, fraud, and abuse. Waste, fraud, abuse. Waste, fraud, and abuse. All I want is one thing, three words. We don't want any waste, fraud, or abuse. Very simple. Waste, fraud, abuse.

Eliminating waste, fraud and abuse is the oft publicly stated mantra of congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump. But there is one major part of the federal government. And I mean major.

where we have absolutely no idea how much waste, fraud and abuse is going on. And yet this agency is getting a large increase in the one big beautiful bill. There's a lot of waste in the military budget. It has never passed an audit.

We just go round and round on that. They have any number of large programs that are way over budget and behind schedule. So that's former Massachusetts Congressman Democrat John Tierney, who investigated defense spending while he served in the House. Now, as Tierney mentioned, as of 2024, the Pentagon has failed seven audits in a row.

And yet, the one big beautiful bill, for the first time in U.S. history, is requesting a defense budget that crosses the $1 trillion mark. $1 trillion. And supporters insist the price tag is worth the investment. Under President Trump's leadership, this budget puts America first and gives our warriors what they need.

The $961.6 billion budget request, over $1 trillion for national security, will end four years of chronic underinvestment in our military. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth there. He says the budget would help the Defense Department pursue its core priorities. Restore the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and reestablish deterrence. So what would that trillion dollars be spent on?

And does it actually substantially increase U.S. national security? Well, Lindsay Kashkirian joins me now to help answer those questions. She's the program director for the National Priorities Project with the Institute for Policy Studies. Lindsay, welcome back to On Point. Thanks for having me, Magda. Okay, so first put this in context.

Trillion dollars sounds like a lot. I mean, it is actually a lot of money. But how much more is it in comparison to previous Pentagon budgets? Yeah, so it's a great question. We've been expecting to see the Pentagon budget reach a trillion dollars for

for several years, but we weren't expecting it to reach it quite this quickly. The Pentagon budget has been over $800 billion in recent years, close to $900 billion. So this is a significant increase. We thought we had a couple more years. But President Trump has chosen that he wants to kind of push that faster, increase the spending faster.

We do typically see annual increases to Pentagon spending. It tends to go up every single year. There are exceptions to that, but not very many. But this trillion dollar budget is the highest Pentagon budget in decades. It's higher than the height of the Cold War. It's higher than the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It's higher than the height of the Vietnam War. So this is a historically high budget budget.

for the Pentagon in war. And about half of that is every year is going to corporate contractors. So it's a huge payout for them. And the other thing is that this increase is likely to just continue. So it's likely to kind of compound as we see it go forward over multiple years. We'll talk about the contractors a little later in the show, Lindsay. But again, in order to understand sort of how much of overall federal spending is this, how would you describe that?

So this is typically part of the discretionary budget, and it's typically more than half of that budget. And that budget pays for things like public education and medical research and the NIH that we've seen face attacks from Doge and from the Trump administration. It pays for all of our scientific research. It pays for a lot of veterans care. So there are so many parts of this budget that kind of have to fit into this budget.

portion of the budget. There are some things that are excluded like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those are the big ones. But so everything else has to fit into the rest of this one particular bucket of spending. And we've seen it, the Pentagon be over half of that budget routinely for many, many years. But this combined with

For those of us who are not budget wonks?

Let's just do a little clarification here. So you said that Pentagon spending is part of non-discretionary spending? No, it is part of discretionary. Okay, so meaning that they have a choice every year. Yeah, they have a choice every year. They have to pass this budget again, and every year they make decisions about what they're going to fund. And it includes all of these things. Of course, this year we have this budget.

big, beautiful budget bill that is also cutting Medicaid. And I know you've done episodes on that. And that is also cutting food stamps and cutting some of those other programs. So we have all this package where there's this massive increase to Pentagon spending and also a massive increase to the spending on deportations. They want to triple the spending, the annual spending on immigrant detentions. So that's also an area that's getting a huge increase.

But then essentially cutting everything else, cutting Medicaid, cutting food stamps, the plans from the Trump administration, you know, involve massive cuts to the State Department, huge cuts to the Department of Education. All of these other programs are essentially under attack. OK. And again, just for clarity's sake, yes.

Discretionary spending, that's where the Pentagon falls. Mandatory spending, those are the big ones like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. That's right. And that is what the big beautiful bill is dealing with. Got it. All right. So let me ask you, you said that this is basically the largest Pentagon budget, larger than Cold War, larger than Vietnam, etc. Just to be clear, that is, of course, inflation adjusted. Right.

Yes. Yes. That is inflation adjusted. OK. Yeah. I mean, these days with like numbers being what they are and the way stuff is talked about and perhaps taken out of context, I want to be clear about all of these details. Absolutely. And so can you tell me a little bit more about why, as you said, people like you who watch defense spending so, so closely, you know, you knew that it was going to hit a trillion dollars someday, but you didn't think that it would have been in this next budget. Why is that?

Just based on the rate of increase in recent years. You know, like I said, we're used to seeing this budget go up every year. There has been a dynamic in the past where when the two parties have had to sort of negotiate more to reach these budgets, there has been an insistence by Democrats that

increases in Pentagon spending go alongside increases in spending for some other programs that I mentioned, you know, the Department of Education, NIH, those programs. But this year, the Democrats don't have control of either house. They don't have control of the presidency. They don't have a lot of leverage here. So we're kind of seeing this shift

shift in ways that reflect the Republican agenda, which is more Pentagon spending and less for those other things. Okay, and less for those other things. But to be fair, I'm not sure the defense budget has ever been passed as less than the Pentagon requested, no matter which party is in control of Congress. Yes, the typical pattern is it's extremely rare for Congress to say no to anything the Pentagon has asked for. The typical pattern is that instead,

Congress, whichever party is in control, like you said, will pass a budget that gives more money for sort of pet programs, programs that they may feel like create jobs, programs that, you know, they may have received a request from some particular part of the military, you know, from the Navy, for example, or from the Air Force for a particular increase.

And they'll add frequently, but they don't take away. And that's not the way they deal with any other agency in the federal government. It's quite something to hear. Like, oh, the Pentagon says we need $800 billion. And Congress comes back and says, no, no, no, no, no. Take $890 billion. Yes, exactly. OK, Lindsay, Gary, hang on for just a second. When we come back, we're going to talk about specific programs.

that this $1 trillion would go to. And again, that question of whether and how it increases U.S. national security. So we'll be back. This is On Point. Support for On Point comes from Indeed. You just realized that your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. There's no need to wait. You can speed up your hiring with Indeed.

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Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a sneak preview. So, Lindsay, can we talk about some of the things that have been requested or proposed that would be funded by this trillion dollars? One thing that really caught my attention are like new naval vessels, like actual ships. Can you talk about that for a little bit?

Yes. So this is something that there's been sort of a desire for from the Pentagon for quite some time. There is a big increase in the budget for shipbuilding and the industrial base for shipbuilding. You know, part of the argument here is it's supposed to be a confrontation with China that we're planning for. And so that's what they're thinking about.

And part of the argument is China has a certain number of ships. We have a certain number of ships. We want our number to be bigger than their number. And we're going to build more ships until we get there. But this fails to take account of a couple of important things. One is what the ships do and what the capabilities of the ships are. So they're not comparing apples to apples when they do these numbers comparisons. The Chinese ships are...

have very different capabilities than the American ships. So it's the wrong question to be asking. Yeah. Um, but can I just, can I just jump in here really quickly? Cause just to let folks know that it's not just you saying that China is one of the major reasons why, uh, the administration is interested in, um, military shipbuilding. We actually have a clip here from four star general Jack Keane. Um,

He was on Fox Business in May, and he said that approving this huge military budget just, quote, makes sense given the current geopolitical climate. It's indisputable. If people sort of classified briefings and where we are with China, we would understand that we have to dig ourselves out of this hole. What are we really trying to do? Are we trying to win a war with China? What we're trying to do is prevent a war with China.

So, Lindsay, I mean, you were going to get to another thing, but this is actually not a crazy thing to say. I mean, like there is a great amount of concern regarding Chinese potential bellicosity, you know, regarding Taiwan, for example, and the military and strategic advantage China would have if it decided to, you know, start a war in the Pacific. Right.

Yes, that's right. There is major concern about that. The number of ships is not just sort of an argument about that, though. It's also sort of a broader who's going to dominate the world in the 21st century. Honestly, that is part. And you'll hear politicians talk about that all the time, too, about, you know, is this going to be a Chinese century or an American century? Right.

So that's part of what they're thinking about as well. And on the front of sort of preventing war versus winning a war, the problem with that line of argument is that there is an arms race aspect to this, where China has this number of ships, we build more ships. What's their response? Their response is to build more ships, and it just keeps going. So

There's kind of no end in sight and it could take up more and more money for both countries. It could take away from other domestic priorities for both countries. So it's kind of a lose-lose proposition in a lot of ways for us to just go headlong into this arms race. But that's kind of what that line of thinking is doing. The other side of that is that if they're really interested in preventing a war with China, they're

The Trump budget proposal cuts the State Department budget by over 80%. And that should be our first line of prevention of war with China. It should be negotiation and diplomacy. But we aren't going to have that if we're cutting the budget by 80%. So does the Navy even want these ships? No.

The Navy does want many of them, but Congress also tends to add. And that's where I mentioned that this is a jobs program is one of the parts of this.

There are many congressional districts where there are shipbuilding facilities, where there are ports, where there are opportunities for this to really create jobs. And this is one of the most common items where Congress will add money above and beyond what the Pentagon even asks for.

And that's because they see it as a job creation program, even though we know that the same amount of money put into education or clean energy or healthcare or many other industries would actually create more jobs. But this is a politically easier way to pass that money. And it's almost traditional in Congress that they just pour more money into shipbuilding when they get the chance. Okay, so there's a couple more. I mean, obviously...

There are thousands and thousands of defense spending line items. We've only picked a few, a tiny number of them, but these are the ones that caught our attention specifically.

$25 billion for the proposed Golden Dome missile shield project that President Trump wants. This is another thing that, OK, $25 billion, whether or not the system can actually be made in reality seems to be beside the point. But contractors would benefit from the approval of this project, right? Yeah.

Yes, contractors would benefit hugely. This is going to be essentially all contractor money. And $25 billion is just kind of the opening bid. So if this program goes forward and the Pentagon continues to pursue it and Congress continues to fund it, we'll see it go well beyond $25 billion. So this is really just the beginning. It's also worth noting that any of these sort of space-based programs that the Pentagon is proposing, like

Also are very likely, and I know there's been a big spat and it's been all over the news, but very likely to benefit Elon Musk's companies, very, very likely to benefit SpaceX. They are one of the prime contractors for some of these things. And so the whole conception of that is,

sort of lends itself to funneling money toward SpaceX and toward those companies. As you noted, also, it is not a feasible program to create this missile defense program for the entire United States. Well, so SpaceX makes me think of the parts of the budget that actually do have to deal with significant changes in technology, and the militaries need to keep up with those changes and, you know, use them to

the advantage of national security, right? I mean, thinking about AI, thinking about improvements in drone technology. I mean, these are for wars of the future. And so that seems to be sensible spending here. What's the problem?

Well, the problem with Golden Dome is that it's not a feasible proposal. You can't build a missile defense shield for the entire United States. And I know you already did a whole episode on this. So that's the big problem with the Golden Dome program. And it'll be, as I mentioned, $25 billion is just kind of the opening bid. It's a way to get a foot in the door. That expense is likely to explode. We've seen that happen with similar programs many times.

But in the broader question, the problem with this is that we are kind of on a whole new battlefield, so to speak, with these new weapons. And you're talking about drone weapons, many of them AI-controlled. These weapons have the potential for increasing civilian casualties. They have the potential for, as you can imagine, AI-controlled

choosing its targets, supposedly with some human involvement, but we don't know how well that's going to work or whether that's even going to be the standard going forward, you know, could potentially choose the wrong target, right? And then there's not enough accountability for that. It's the AI that did it. So that is the big problem. That is one of the really big problems with this

And there's also just a lack of international negotiation about sort of what the rules of war will be for these weapons. You know, we have that for nuclear weapons to some degree, although we've lost a lot of our nuclear weapons treaties and the negotiations have not been moving forward.

But there is a history and a background and a precedent for being able to make those kinds of international negotiations about what will be allowable under the rules of war and things like that. And none of that has taken place for these weapons. Oh, interesting. So there's a big accountability question across the board here. All right. Let's get back to those contractors, Lindsay. Correct me if I'm wrong, but right now we have, what, five major defense contractors in the United States? Yeah.

Yes, there are five big ones and there used to be many more. And the history of that is that in the 1990s, there was huge consolidation where weapons contractors buying up the smaller ones and we got these big five. Do you know we did a show about that too? I mean, we love covering the Defense Department. Yes, I love it. Yes.

OK, so there's five now. And you said that these I mean, there's obviously many, many subcontractors below them. But in terms of the who gets awarded them and 50 percent of this one trillion dollars would be spent on contractors.

Yes, that's about right. So we're already seeing the annual amount of money dedicated to contractors is over $400 billion. It'll go up. It follows the trajectory of wherever the Pentagon's budget is going. And when we spend more on the Pentagon, we spend more on the contractors.

And so there will be a huge profit for them in this. And then, of course, we talked about they're the big five. This is programs like Lockheed Martin and its F-35 jet fighter, which is a program that has had just been plagued with problems for years. Senator John McCain called it a scandal and a tragedy. And

And so it'll go to programs like that and contractors like that, but it will also go to these newer, smaller sort of tech contractors. And, you know, we're seeing the SpaceX's, but also, you know, even all the tech companies like Google and Microsoft looking to get in on this game and many smaller companies, too.

OK, well, Lockheed Martin, as you mentioned, is the number one defense contractor in the United States. And Lockheed's CEO, Frank St. John, was on CNBC just a couple of days ago from the Paris air show. And he says the current state of, you know, wars around the world, Ukraine, the Middle East, will likely have a positive impact on defense spending in the near future.

I would say we are in probably the beginning of a three to five year surge in defense spending, especially here in Europe.

The first couple of years, there was a lot of dialogue and understanding the issue and understanding the demand for deterrence capability. Now we're starting to see those budgets come into play in the European countries, as well as some increases back in the U.S. domestically. So I think for the next three to five years, budgets are going to be pretty substantial. So we have the reality of global conflicts as one way to measure deterrence.

whether defense spending is being done in the right amount and in the right way, then we also have the other reality of we don't actually really know if the money that's already been spent has been spent appropriately because the Defense Department keeps failing those audits. Well, on that point, we recently spoke with Larry Wilkerson. He's a retired colonel in the United States Army, and he also served as chief of staff to the late Colin Powell when Powell was both chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state.

And Wilkerson has been very close to the budget defense, excuse me, the defense budget making process. And he says it is deeply flawed.

It's because we have a polluted system, a polluted system that favors shareholders in the military contractors, CEOs, COOs, and others in the military contractor leadership. Wilkerson believes defense contractors have an undue level of influence on the defense budget. And he gave us an example. During Powell's chairmanship at the Joint Chiefs, he and Powell asked the defense contractors at the time, which was a larger group at the time,

What would happen if the federal government reduced its defense spending? The meeting was to say, OK, we've got 100 contractors right now, 150 doing a billion or more dollars of business with Pentagon every year. We're going to go down to about six or seven. What's that going to do?

And the contractors themselves, I remember Norm Augustine from Lockheed, for example, they came back to us and said, what you're going to do is create about six or seven who get all the contracts, establish a monopoly, produce products. And thank you very much. Charge you a fortune for it.

That's exactly what has happened. That's exactly what has happened. Now, Colonel Wilkerson says eliminating the need for competition between contractors has set the federal government up to pay higher prices for defense-related goods, everything from missile systems to ships. And he believes the relationship is exacerbated by what he calls the revolving door between people who serve in the Pentagon and the contractors with whom they're doing business.

The revolving door is all these flag officers, three and four star generals, who work programs while they're in the Pentagon in their uniform and leadership positions, retire and go get seven-figure salaries from Lockheed Martin or Boeing or whatever to do essentially the same thing they were doing in the Pentagon, but now for a profit motive. The year prior to that hearing, which I think would have been '23,

80% of the three and four stars who left the Pentagon retiring from active duty actually went to work for a defense contractor or a similar type organization. Colonel Wilkerson says contractors have found ways to increase profits by insisting on deals where they produce proprietary technology and insists that their company can be the only company to service the equipment.

Wilkerson says this increases incentives for contractors to charge a premium for those services. When you take a private, you take a sergeant, you take a specialist four or whatever,

equivalent in the Navy, and you tell him, fix that piece of equipment, fix that weapon system, he's getting the same pay he gets if he doesn't do it. I mean, he's getting the pay and the pay's at a fixed rate. When you tell a contractor to do it, he is going to stick you for as far as he possibly can, and they have done it ad nauseum. Now, Colonel Wilkerson does acknowledge that there are hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to a Pentagon operation

audit in the one big, beautiful budget bill, but he doesn't believe the results will be reliable. The sector defense right now cannot pass an audit. Hexeth has promised to do that. He will not. I guarantee you he will not. If he does, he'll lie about it.

They can't pass an audit because they do not know how much money is going out on any given day or week or month, and they don't know what it's going out for. It's retired Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson. He served as former chief of staff to the late Colin Powell when Powell was both the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state. Lindsay Kushgerian, hang on for just a second. I want to hear all about what you think regarding Pentagon audits when we come back. This is On Point. ♪

You're back with On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and today is the fourth day, as I've said, of our week-long exploration of different parts of the one big, beautiful budget bill. And today we are looking at the one agency in the federal government that instead of receiving some historic cuts, is receiving an historic proposed increase, and that is the Department of Defense. And it's slated to get a $1 trillion cut.

budget if the versions that have been put out by the House and are currently working its way through the Senate aren't significantly changed. Lindsay Kushgerian joins us. She's program director for the National Priorities Project with the Institute for Policy Studies. And Lindsay, as you know, we opened the show with hearing a lot of lawmakers talk about wanting to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. And then I mentioned that the Pentagon is

has never, or at least not yet, passed an audit, meaning that it can't fully account for how the money that it's receiving is being spent. Is that still true? That is still true. And not only has the Pentagon failed its

It's passed seven audits in a row. It was the last federal agency to even manage to complete an audit. So the last federal agency before that to manage to both complete and pass an audit was the Department of Homeland Security in the early 2010s. And so the Defense Department is first.

far behind every other federal agency in terms of its accountability for its spending. And that's really remarkable when you consider that it is also the biggest federal agency. So it has the most money and the least accountability. So there could be a lot of waste, fraud and abuse going on in defense spending, but we just don't know about it.

We don't know about all of it. We definitely know about some of it. There have been plenty of investigations into price gouging by contractors where the Pentagon is paying far more for parts than they should be. One big example that I like to give is there's a particular part that both NASA and the Pentagon buy, and

The Pentagon was paying hundreds of times for the same part from the same contractor what NASA was paying. And that's really just because the contractors know they can get away with it. They know they can charge that. They know the Pentagon budget can accommodate that. And there's just zero accountability from Congress for that type of waste. But, you know, the thing about an audit is that it can tell you where the money is going and that's,

The fact that the Pentagon has never passed an audit is unconscionable. But the audit itself can't tell you whether the thing that is being paid for is justifiable itself. And so there's lots of things in the Pentagon budget that are waste in the form of they cost more than they should. But there's lots of waste also in the form of should we even be paying for that thing in the first place? Can I just follow up on that? Because that's a really important point. We have heard repeatedly that

And most recently from Secretary Hegseth, right, that there has been, in his words, historic underinvestment in the military. Now, I think that there is an argument to be made in favor of that because I'm just thinking back to this is my favorite example, just because it's so tragic of, you know, soldiers in the Iraq war who had to jerry rig armor around their head.

Right.

But, I mean, overall, that aside, it's kind of hard to square this idea that an $860 billion budget, a $1 trillion budget, and we don't even know exactly where all the money is going, equates to an overall underinvestment in the military, Lindsay. Yeah.

That's right. And I think it's important to remember that the big additions that we're seeing for Golden Dome or for shipbuilding are not things that would address those needs of the actual troops. So that's important. I think it's also important to remember that while those troops in Iraq didn't have what they needed to protect themselves,

It was also a larger failure of the Pentagon in going to war in Iraq in the first place and allowing that decision to happen. And I think it's always important to remember, you know, the Pentagon has certain needs. Secretary Hegseth talks about readiness. But are these wars that we should be fighting in the first place? And I think that's where the United States often sort of charges full speed ahead into conflicts where we really have no business being.

I mean, this seems to be an even more pressing question given the intensity around what will President Trump do with Iran as, you know, the conflict between Israel and Iran escalates. Go ahead. I don't know if you have a thought about that. Yeah. I mean, we're all waiting to see whether President Trump will choose to involve the U.S. directly in these exchanges that we're seeing between Israel and Iran where Israel bombed Iran and now they're going back and forth and

President Trump hasn't said whether definitively he'll be involved or not, whether the U.S. will get directly involved. But, you know, that is a major potential confrontation. And we've only been out of war in the Middle East officially for a few years now. To see us go right back in would just be...

Bad decision making kind of beyond belief that to see that, you know, we just did that. Most of the country agrees that was a huge mistake. President Trump has said it was a huge mistake. Why would we go right back and do the same thing again?

Well, I mean, because we have the largest military in the world, right? I mean, we spend what? More than the next 10 top spending countries combined. Is that right? That's right. Yes, that is right. But this is I think this is another danger of having such a big military and such a big budget is that then it's so easy to go and get involved in anything, anywhere, whether it's a good idea or not.

Yeah. So let me get back to I mean, so the political question there is is intense, right? And urgent. But let me get back to the actual sort of dollars and cents issue. I don't I don't know why, Lindsay, but I cannot get over the DOD not being able to pass or actually failing its audits. And we in Congress still giving it more money.

Do you have any insight or advice as to what it would take for the Pentagon to successfully complete an audit? I mean, there is what, this $380 million in the One Big Beautiful Bill for another audit? Yes. Yes. They do need more resources to successfully complete an audit. But

But they're not close to passing. And you played this in the quote from Colonel Wilkerson. They're not close. They won't pass this year. They won't pass next year. Most recent defense comptrollers have admitted that they're not that close to passing. They try to play up the slight progress that they've made where, you know, they used to be able to account for less than half of their losses.

And now they can account for a little bit more. And they've tried to play that up. But the truth is, they are nowhere close. There have been proposals from Congress, from members of Congress, none that have passed to do things like freeze the Pentagon budget until they pass an audit or even make small cuts to the Pentagon budget to parts that don't involve the troops directly.

small cuts until the Pentagon manages to pass an audit to try to introduce some accountability. But as I said, those have not passed. Now, Lindsay, a little earlier, you had talked about the fact that one of the reasons why the Pentagon budget continues to grow, or actually, let me say more importantly, why Congress

more to the Pentagon than the military itself even asks for is because, what, look, in every state, in almost every congressional district, there are some jobs that are related to defense spending. So, you know,

you know, whether we like it or not, I can kind of understand the political expediency in protecting those jobs. So we actually asked Colonel Wilkerson about that, about the relationship between the two and if he's ever seen an example of when defense jobs did go away and how did that impact a particular district and he

He gave us this example because while he was chief of staff to Secretary of State Powell, his office was charged with reorganizing and cutting some military resources. And obviously that was met with significant resistance from

from the communities that would experience those cuts. And yet he gave us this example of how, at least in one place, those fears proved unfounded. One guy called from Pier 4 in Newport, Rhode Island. He had been adamant, if you shut this pier down, Newport will go to hell. It will go to hell. We get so much money, oh, it'll go to hell. Seven years later, we checked in with him. You know, we were out of office at that time, but we checked in with him and he said, best decision I ever made. Ha ha ha.

We had $4 billion worth of civilian commerce fall in on that space. You were generating maybe $200 million. And you were also creating all kinds of problems in the bars when your sailors came in, got drunk, and broke everything up. And the same with the 7th Division in Monterey, California. Four or five years later, we've been told, oh, man, that's the best thing you ever did.

We love it. We love it without those people here. OK, so that's Colonel retired Colonel Larry Wilkerson with at least one example there. Lindsay, I have to ask you, underlying all of this is not just a political, but, you know, strongly emotional unwillingness to reduce the size of the U.S. military. Right. Because the first message we get is don't hurt the troops.

But last time we had you on the show, what, four years ago, you had done an analysis then that found that, OK, this was four years ago. And I think you found that some 300 billion dollars could actually be reduced in the Pentagon's budget and not have a negative impact on America's military readiness or global capabilities. Am I remembering that right?

Yes, that's right. And not that it wouldn't have no impact, but it would impact things like our ability to just jump into a conflict. But like I said, we don't belong in a lot of those conflicts in the first place. So I think what we really have to do is back up a little bit. The Pentagon is going full steam ahead with their vision, which is full military dominance all around the world, all the time, by a large margin.

And we really have to ask, is that the most important priority for the country? Do we really need that degree of military dominance of the entire world? Or could we pull back a bit, not harm our defense of our own country, not harm our defense of many of our allies, but spend a lot less, have less of a presence around the world? In some ways, that might actually make us safer because we

To tell the truth, our presence on military bases and troops and our ships sailing the seas and all of these things are frequently provocations to countries where we have an adversarial relationship. So it can actually lead us into conflict rather than preventing it.

But should we be pulling some of those things back in order to have those resources to spend on other things here at home? And I think the answer to us is yes, that there is a lot that we can do. We have...

more than 700 military bases overseas. We don't need many of those. General Mark Milley, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a while, said as much. He said we don't need the overseas footprint that we have and that we should be cutting back on that. That hasn't happened. There hasn't even been a serious consideration of it. So there's a lot that we could do to save large amounts of money that we just aren't really considering.

Okay. There's one more. I'm going to come back to that in a second, Lindsay, but there's one more thing I wanted to play from Colonel Wilkerson because we've been obviously airing a lot of his criticisms of how money is spent within the Pentagon. But I should note that he served in the U.S. military for some 30 years before he also moved to being chief of staff for Colin Powell.

And he said to us that he does think that there actually are some very worthy systems that should be funded because I guess to your point, Lindsay, they work as they are intended to and actually have been shown to deter further conflict. We now have a very vital weapons system, very vital, integral to the real security of this country. Attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines.

almost invulnerable. The only weapon system left in the panoply of weapon systems that are, whoever has them and uses them skillfully, invulnerable.

So, Lindsay, I mean, so good weapons systems that actually work and prove to achieve their goal, right, which is to keep the U.S. out of conflict. But to your point earlier, willingness to enter conflict, though, isn't a decision that ultimately comes from the Pentagon, right? Their job is to be ready for it. It's a decision that comes from the president of the United States himself.

and Congress. It's a political one. And we do seem somewhat trapped in that, you know, military, industrial, political complex. I'm not sure I see a way out unless leadership in the White House and Congress really rethink what they want the purpose of the United States military to be. Yeah, there are a couple of really important parts of that. One is that Congress has

pretty much completely abdicated their responsibility for any of this. They passed a war authorization to a couple of them in 2002 and 2003, and they're supposed to authorize wars. This is their job. It's part of the Constitution. They haven't done that in the 20 plus years since then. They have just abandoned that role and allowed presidents to make all the decisions on their own.

That said, I think it's an overstatement to say that the Pentagon just follows the lead of the president.

Pentagon leaders have a big voice in the White House and they have opinions and they will oftentimes argue in favor of military intervention at times when a president might not otherwise choose so. And if there aren't other voices offering other options, that can lead us into conflict. And that's one of the things that's so dangerous about the cuts and the dismantling of the State Department is that those should be those other voices.

So the thing about, you know, submarines and nuclear submarines is as a deterrent. It's interesting that he said twice that they're invulnerable because that is the weakness of many of our weapons systems is that they are far from invulnerable. They're very vulnerable to attack. And obviously, that's not what you want in a weapon system. But the nuclear deterrence aspect of it is.

That's fine. I don't know whether Colonel Wilkerson would agree with this or not, but we have fallen completely off the charts of any nuclear negotiation that used to happen. We used to have all of these nuclear treaties with Russia, with other countries. We used to...

we were cutting our number, the world's number of nuclear weapons every year. And now we're about to see that start to increase again. And we've seen, we've lost many of our treaties that we had. And that's a failure of diplomacy. And that's something where the best nuclear deterrent would be to get back on track with those negotiations and start reducing the number of nuclear weapons again. Yeah. So all of these sort of non-nuclear

military ways to then end up maybe perhaps using better the money that we spend on the military in more efficiently

And yet we still continue to grow that defense budget. And now it's over the trillion dollar mark. Lindsay Kashkarian, program director for the National Priorities Project with the Institute for Policy Studies. Thank you so much for joining us. And by the way, tomorrow, we're going to wrap up our week long look at the one big, beautiful bill act by taking a look at the deficit. So join us for that. This is On Point. On Point.

Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from BU Questrom School of Business. How should companies balance short-term pressures with long-term interests? In the relentless pursuit of profits in the present, are we sacrificing the future? These are questions posed at a recent panel hosted by BU Questrom School of Business. The full conversation is available on the Is Business Broken podcast. Listen on for a preview.

Just in your mind, what is short-termism? If there's a picture in the dictionary, what's the picture? I'll start with one ugly one. When I was still doing activism as global head of activism and defense, so banker defending corporations, I worked with Toshiba in Japan. And those guys had five different activists, each one of which had a very different idea of what they should do right now, like short-term.

very different perspectives. And unfortunately, under pressure from the shareholders, the company had to go through two different rounds of breaking itself up, selling itself and going for shareholder votes. I mean, that company was effectively broken because the leadership had to yield under the pressure of shareholders who couldn't even agree on

on what's needed in the short term. So to me, that is when this behavioral problem, you're under pressure and you can't think long term, becomes a real, real disaster. Tony, you didn't have a board like that. I mean, the obvious ones, I mean, you look at, there's quarterly earnings, we all know that. You have businesses that

will do everything they can to make a quarterly earning, right? And then we'll get into analysts and what causes that. I'm not even gonna go there. But there's also, there's a lot of pressure on businesses to, if you've got a portfolio of businesses, sell off an element of that portfolio. And as a manager, you say, wait, this is a really good business. Might be down this year, might be, but it's a great business.

Another one is R&D spending. You know, you can cut your R&D spend if you want to, and you can make your numbers for a year or two, but we all know where that's going to lead a company. And you can see those decisions every day, and you can see businesses that don't make that sacrifice. And I think in the long term, they win.

Andy, I'm going to turn to you. Maybe you want to give an example of people complaining about short-termism that you think isn't. I don't really believe it exists. I mean, you know, again, I don't really even understand what it is. But what I hear is we take some stories and then we impose on them this idea that had they behaved differently, thought about the long term, they would have behaved differently. That's not really science.

Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Mehrotra Institute for Business, Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.