Revealed: Trump's 'Big Bill' will actually make the military 'weaker'

While President Donald Trump has spoken often about enhancing "military excellence and readiness," his first major domestic policy bill may actually undermine the U.S. military, according to one expert.

As part of a collection of analyses on H.R. 1 ("The One Big Beautiful Bill Act"), the New York Times on Monday published a breakdown of the legislation's impact on the Pentagon by Kori Schake, who is the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Schake pointed out that despite a $150 billion increase in military spending and the administration boasting that this would mark the first trillion-dollar defense budget in history, the bill may actually end up harming military readiness in the long run.

[T]he $150 billion in the measure is a one-time increase rather than a permanent change and one that the submitted budget wouldn’t sustain," Schake explained. "... When you strip away the financial gimmicks, Mr. Trump’s claimed trillion-dollar defense budget would actually be a $31.5 billion reduction from the last one under President Joe Biden. That’s roughly the annual cost of 10 Army brigades."

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"'Weaker than Biden' is a charge that neither Republicans in Congress nor the American people should countenance," she continued. "The Defense Department is severely underfunded, having lost $50 billion to $70 billion in buying power in just the past two years because of Congress’s failure to pass budgets on time."

Schake noted that Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) has called for military spending to constitute roughly 5% of the United States' GDP each year, which Schake calculated to come out to approximately $353 billion more per year. The AEI scholar also observed that this is the same metric Trump has arbitrarily set for NATO member nations.

"To repair that damage and to confront the convergence of challenges that China, Russia, North Korea and Iran now pose, the U.S. military needs lasting investment," she wrote. "Mr. Trump has demanded NATO allies meet the 5 percent military spending standard to merit continued U.S. support. His administration should meet that standard itself."

Other analyses of the bill the Times included break down how the legislation would harm healthcare affordability by cutting Medicaid by more than $600 billion, in addition to weakening the U.S. healthcare system overall. Other writers called attention to language stripping the courts of the ability to hold Trump administration officials in contempt, and examined provisions that would expand the carceral state to detain more immigrants across the country.

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Click here to read the Times' full article (subscription required).