President Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal, released Friday, calls for boosting total defense funding to $1.5 trillion—a jump that most economists say would represent one of the largest budget increases in American history, rivaling the wartime mobilization of World War II.
“The gap between rhetoric and reality is just so massive,” said Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University. “MAGA was told an untruth by Trump—no foreign wars, no adventurism. Now the defense budget has come in at $1 trillion, and he wants $1.5 trillion. This is a massive militarization—completely the opposite of what he told his base.”
Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said this isn’t quite the largest budget increase in U.S. history—just the largest in the past 80 years or so. The U.S. military budget request of $100 billion in 1943—the peak of World War II mobilization—is worth approximately $1.9 trillion in today’s dollars, by Smetters’s calculation and even more as a share of GDP. “The movement of $350 billion toward mandatory spending is pretty interesting,” Smetters added, flagging how the reconciliation maneuver structurally shifts the nature of the defense commitment in ways that make it harder to reverse.
The budget arrives without official top-line deficit or debt figures, which CRFB president Maya MacGuineas described as an “astonishing lack of information.” The White House’s supplemental documents project that debt would fall to roughly 94% of GDP by 2036, compared with 120% in the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline—but only by assuming 3% average annual real GDP growth over the entire decade. Smetters flagged that assumption as “quite high” and a subject warranting its own scrutiny.
More than a month into the U.S. military campaign against Iran, President Trump finds himself in a precarious political moment, presiding over a deeply unpopular war with widespread economic fallout and facing some of the lowest approval ratings of his second term. The costs have been staggering: The war cost an estimated $11.3 billion in its first six days alone, and new estimates put total spending at roughly $30 billion to $45 billion just over a month in. Meanwhile, the administration has not articulated a clear endgame, with stated reasons for the attack shifting repeatedly—from dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, to regime change, and back again.
“With deficits larger than 6% of GDP and debt around the size of the economy, the president doesn’t propose any plan for putting our budget on a sustainable path,” MacGuineas said.
The budget will set the U.S. on a “perilous fiscal path,” the group argued, calling the $1.5 trillion Pentagon spending spree “a major driver of this dangerous fiscal trajectory.” With the administration seeking much of the funding boost through the reconciliation process, the group argues that it amounts to “handing the Pentagon an unaccountable slush fund.”
The budget also leaves Social Security on track toward insolvency within the decade, according to CRFB, without proposing structural fixes. Hanke noted the cascading pressure the defense surge creates. “Once you push defense to $1.5 trillion, that puts Social Security on even shakier ground,” he said. In the biblical sequence Hanke invoked, the plowshares-into-swords moment is the penultimate act—the mobilization before the reckoning. For America’s fiscal hawks, the reckoning feels closer than ever.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
