Pete Hegseth wants $1.5 trillion and won’t tell Congress what it is for.
A kid walks into the strip-mall recruiter’s office on a Tuesday afternoon. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Mom drove him. The recruiter’s got the desk and the laptop and the glossy brochure with the soldier on the cover. The kid signs. Four years minimum. After that, his life is on the Pentagon’s schedule — where he goes, when he deploys, what he drives, what he fires, how long his enlistment extends, and what happens to his body and his mind and his marriage when the orders stop.
Hegseth is the Pentagon chief. He is asking Congress to fund the kid. He is asking for the money through a procedural mechanism called budget reconciliation, which was designed to bring tax and spending law into line with new fiscal targets, not to deliver a fifteen-hundred-billion-dollar defense budget on a simple-majority vote with no amendments from the minority and no deliberative hearings. The Senate is supposed to deliberate on defense spending line by line, hearing by hearing, markup by markup, because that process is the only mechanism the citizen has to find out what the country is buying. When the executive demands that mechanism be bypassed, the citizen is being told he doesn’t get to know.
Put the number where a working person can see it. $1.5 trillion is more than Congress appropriates in a normal year for everything that isn’t Social Security, Medicare, and the interest on the debt. It is the operating budget of every public hospital in America for about a decade. It is the wages of thirty million jobs at fifty thousand dollars a year. It is every K-12 public school teacher in the country for ten years. It is more than the gross domestic product of Spain. The kid at the recruiter’s office doesn’t need to see the line items. The senators who are supposed to read the bill do. The procedure Hegseth wants to use is the procedure designed so they don’t have to.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Hegseth has spent most of his tenure as Pentagon chief treating Congress as an obstacle to be managed rather than a co-equal branch to be answered. The list of unanswered questions is not a list from the party out of power. It is a list from the party in power, the party whose votes Hegseth now needs: the Iran war. The drug-boat strikes. The cancellation of an armored brigade deployment to Poland. The firing of decorated general officers. The postponement of a bipartisan housing bill. Republicans on the Hill are not happy. They are asking for answers Hegseth is not giving.
What does the $1.5 trillion include? Seventeen billion dollars for Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield — a vanity project, the same Strategic Defense Initiative idea that has failed every time it has been tried since Ronald Reagan proposed it, dressed up in a new name. Tens of billions more for munitions, ships, aircraft, and satellites. The money flows upward to the prime contractors — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics — who build the systems the working-class kid at the recruiter’s office will be trained to operate, then deployed to use, then sent home from, then expected to file a VA claim on when the body breaks.
The Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell posted on social media that the spending plan “isn’t optional.” It is essential, he wrote, to “modernize our forces, support our troops, crush our adversaries, and restore the warrior ethos President Trump demands.” Trump himself posted this month that the spending plan is “a GENERATIONAL Investment in our Military, even bigger than President Reagan’s.” The kid at the strip-mall recruiter’s office on Tuesday is being asked to be the warrior ethos the President’s spokesman is restoring. The kid will not be in the briefing when the budget is presented. The kid will not see the contracts. The kid will be in the briefing when the deployment orders come down, and the contracts will be the reason he goes.
The senators pushing back are not the names the cable shows tell you to expect. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted against confirming Hegseth, told the Journal she does not see reconciliation as the right tool. Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is opposed. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who chairs the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, is opposed. Kevin Kiley, the independent from California, said he didn’t like the reconciliation pathway because it would have established a partisan approach from the outset, and on an issue like national defense, “I think we’ll get a better result, better policy, better buy-in, better implementation if it’s bipartisan from the outset.” These are the people whose job it is to read the bill. They are doing their job. The administration, in demanding they be bypassed, is the one not doing its job.
There is the NATO contradiction to account for as well. The same Hegseth who announced a review of U.S. forces in Europe and the cancellation of an armored brigade deployment to Poland is asking Congress for the money to deter the country that worries the NATO allies most. Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska, was at the meeting and told the Journal that if Hegseth is “weak on NATO, I’ll not support his efforts.” You cannot tell the NATO allies, with one hand, that the United States is reducing its forward presence in Europe and, with the other hand, ask Congress for the money to deter the country that worries them most. The alliance either has the credibility the allies need to make their own defense plans, or it does not. The administration is currently producing evidence for the second reading.
The $1.5 trillion is on top of a separate $67 billion emergency wartime spending request the Pentagon filed this week — double-paying for the same operations, doubling down on the slush-fund approach rather than addressing what the wars are actually costing the men and women being sent to fight them. The working-class kid at the strip-mall recruiter’s office on Tuesday afternoon will not see either the $1.5 trillion or the $67 billion as line items. He will see them as the deployment cycle that does not end, the training rotation that never quiets, the orders that come without explanation, and the body that comes home — if it comes home — with a claim form and a VA phone tree.
My background is the units that ran those operations, and I will tell you what the deliberative appropriations process is for. It is the mechanism by which the rest of the country finds out what the checks are buying. When it works, a senator reads the bill, a committee holds a hearing, a witness answers a question, and the kid at the recruiter’s office is not committed to a war his country has not been told about. When it is bypassed, the kid is committed anyway, and the country that sent him does not know where he has gone.
Hegseth is not the first Pentagon chief to want the money without the questions. He is the first one in a generation to demand it on a simple-majority vote, in a Congress his own party controls, while the working-class men and women his recruiters signed this Tuesday afternoon wait for the deployment orders that the contracts will pay for. The senators pushing back are the last line of procedural defense the kid has. If they fold, the kid signs up and the country signs the check, and neither of them gets to know what for.