Military funding is high, but the specific numbers are murky

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump said he would fund the U.S. military at record levels. Just over one year into his term, funding levels are high — but experts say it's tricky to determine whether funding is at its historical apex.

For fiscal year 2026, Congress appropriated, and the president signed, $838.7 billion for the Pentagon — $8.4 billion above the department's requested amount. Beyond this, nuclear weapons-related appropriations for the Energy Department totaled $33.95 billion, and military-related construction, which is handled separately by Congress, totaled $19.74 billion. 

Altogether, this comes to $892.39 billion for the military in fiscal year 2026 (Oct. 1, 2025 through Sept. 30, 2026).

When adjusted for inflation, that would be "a slight reduction from the last budget of the Biden administration and well below the peak funding year in fiscal year 2010, at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

But there's another pot of money that could be included: another $119.3 billion in military-related spending approved as part of Trump's signature tax and spending law from 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 

If the Pentagon uses all that money in fiscal year 2026, then it would be about $1.01 trillion, a record-breaking amount without taking inflation into account, Murphy said. If inflation is factored in, the 2026 amount would be almost identical to the 2010 level under then-President Barack Obama.

However, the 2025 law lacked spending details, so the public can't be sure how much of that amount is being spent, and "the Pentagon has yet to submit spending plans for the remaining sum," said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that tracks the federal budget.

Harrison said "it seems unlikely" that the Pentagon would use all of that money in fiscal year 2026, but lacking the data, it's impossible to know.

As for fiscal year 2027, Trump hasn't submitted a formal budget request, but he said on Truth Social that it would contain a $1.5 trillion military budget. That would easily be the largest in history — if it were proposed, enacted by Congress, and spent by the Pentagon.

Spending on the military is unquestionably high today, potentially close to a record. But the lack of public detail now makes that hard to confirm. We rate this In the Works.