Unbridled: How Massive Pentagon Spending Happens by Design

That number will almost certainly end up higher because, by law, no matter how generous the president’s request is, the Pentagon is required to ask Congress for even more money. The chief of staff of each military branch must put together an unfunded priority list – nicknamed a “wish list” – requesting money for items not included in the president’s budget. 

This has been routine since the 1990s, and the procedure became federal law in 2017. The lists don’t need to include lengthy justifications of why the money is needed, as is the case for most budget requests to Congress.

These “Dear Santa” letters totaled at least $30.8 billion in fiscal year 2025, $17 billion in 2024, and $21.5 billion in 2023. Some of the items the Defense Department “wished” for in those three years include:

• $6.8 million for an Air Force dog kennel
• $10.2 million for a “high altitude balloon”
• $22.5 million for “mobile kitchen trailers”
• $106.6 million for a power plant in Djibouti
• $8.5 million for the Space Command to renovate its temporary base while it waits for its actual base to be built
• $20 million for a Great Lakes icebreaker that can sail through frozen water – 10 years from now
• $398 million for classified Space Force programs 

The practice persists even though the Defense Department isn’t always happy about it. The Biden administration’s Pentagon Comptroller, Mike McCord, publicly supported ending the requirement. He wrote in a 2023 letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that unfunded priority lists are “not an effective way to illuminate our top priorities.”

The opportunities to spend go beyond even the wish lists. Members of Congress often add “Congressional increases” to the Pentagon budget – de facto earmarks for programs neither the president nor Pentagon officials thought were important enough to include even in their dream spending plans.

Congressional increases added at least $22.7 billion to the military budget in 2024. The dollar total is likely even higher because the public report lists only increases of $20 million or more. Auditors at the government watchdog group Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the missing information, but were told that no record exists.

The largest single addition last year was $1.8 billion for the Navy to buy ten extra planes. Other add-ons have little direct connection to defense, such as $110 million for prostate cancer research.

Although Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency to signal his commitment to reducing and streamlining government, the president is sending mixed signals on Pentagon spending. On the one hand, the president said in an April 9 executive order that he wanted the Defense Department to compile a list of programs more than 15% behind schedule or 15% over cost so they can be assessed for possible cancellation. The (soft) deadline was last week. 

At the same time, however, Trump has been receptive to the complaints of lawmakers like Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who lamented in February that defense spending was “near record lows as a percentage of our gross domestic product, and all aspects of our military forces are now in dire need of repair or replacement.” (Defense spending in 2023 was 3.4% of GDP, in line with the last 10 years but well below the Reagan-era high of 6.8% in 1982, before the end of the Cold War.)

Trump’s planned increase of the military budget would go a long way to wiping out the $160 billion that DOGE claims it’s saved taxpayers with its government-wide cost cuts.

The added resources don’t mean the military is getting stronger or better at equipping its warfighters. It means there’s more bureaucracy to feed. In 2000, the Defense Department spent roughly $150 billion on its active personnel, adjusted for inflation. Since then, that number has only inched upward, to $166 billion in 2024. Active forces made up just 21% of the 2025 budget request. Most of the rest is eaten up by “operations and maintenance,” the conducting of day-to-day business, which has increased sharply. In 2000, the military spent roughly $175 billion 2024 dollars on O&M. For 2025, the Pentagon requested $338 billion, a 93% increase. 

Shortchanging personnel has consequences. A March report from the Government Accountability Office found “shortages in trained maintenance personnel” compromised the ability of the Army, Navy, and Air Force to meet mission-capable goals for many aircraft. It reported that “the Navy EA-18G Growler – an aircraft with advanced electronic warfare capabilities … [and] the Army CH-47F Chinook – the Army’s only heavy-lift cargo rotary wing aircraft” failed to meet their “mission-capable rate goal in any year from fiscal year 2015 through fiscal year 2024.” The GAO also found that “the Air Force C-130H Hercules and C-130J Super Hercules – performing airlift support and aeromedical missions” met its goal just once during that period and the B-2 Spirit – the Air Force’s “stealth bomber that can deliver both conventional and nuclear munitions by penetrating an enemy’s defenses” met its mission-capable rate goal just four of the 10 years.

Similar problems plague the military’s marquee weapons. The F-35 Lightning II, an impressive bit of high-tech hardware, can move at supersonic speed, maneuver against enemy aircraft, hit ground targets, and, in stealth mode, evade radar. One variant can even hover. The Air Force, the Navy, and the Marine Corps all have their versions of the fighter; there are more than 700 F-35s deployed in bases and on carriers around the world. 

By the 2040s, the Defense Department plans to acquire 2,470 more F-35s for an estimated total cost of about $442 billion, and to keep them flying into the 2080s. The cost of maintaining the F-35 fleet over the next six decades is the real budget-killer. It soared to $1.58 trillion in 2023, 44% more than the $1.1 trillion in 2018. 

Even with that price tag, the F-35 has availability problems, according to the Government Accountability Office. The GAO’s litany of concerns includes a shortage of spare parts, inadequate training of mechanics, and an overreliance on contractors to repair the jets, leaving the military at their mercy. The result is a disappointing level of readiness, which the GAO defines as “the percentage of time during which these aircraft are safe to fly and able to perform at least one tasked mission.” 

The F-35 might be a test case for military spending because it could be seen at odds with Trump’s noninterventionist, “America First” philosophy, according to Richard Aboulafia, managing director of the consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory. “It was developed in partnership with our allies, and it’s meant as an expeditionary force, meaning it’s good for defending U.S. interests in Europe or Asia, but not as effective at home,” he said. On the other hand, the pricey plane is built in Texas with an engine from Florida.

Sky-high costs also afflict Naval housing. Soon after John Phelan was sworn in as Secretary of the Navy in March, he reviewed the bill for a new set of barracks to house his sailors. Phelan, a longtime investment executive without military experience, said he had trouble believing it. “I see numbers on things that are eye-opening to me,” Phelan said at an April 9 public appearance. The barracks cost $2.5 million a key (per room), he said. “My old firm, we built the finest hotel in Hawaii for $800,000 a key, and that has some pretty nice marble and some pretty nice things in it, and I’m trying to understand how we can get to those numbers.” 

Another chronic concern is the time and expense it takes the Navy and its shipbuilding contractor, Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), to put together a fleet of battle-ready fighting vessels. The planned July delivery of the newest aircraft carrier, the $12.9 billion USS John F. Kennedy, will likely need to be rescheduled. The ship is 95% complete, but there are issues with the elevators used to move munitions from below deck and aircraft launch and recovery systems. Similar problems plagued the USS Gerald R. Ford, which was delivered 32 months late in 2017 without functioning elevators. The next carrier on the assembly line, the $13.5 billion USS Enterprise, is running more than two years behind schedule. 

Delivery delays of as much as 18 months are also expected for the lead boat in the Columbia class of nuclear-armed submarines. 

Delivery of the first frigate in the Navy’s Constellation class has been changed to 2029 from 2026, and its cost has swelled to $1.4 billion from an initial estimate of $1 billion. Frigates are armed fighter vessels often used to escort other ships through treacherous waters.

The Air Force was singled out for criticism in the April 9 White House order. The first flight of the Sentinel, the Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, is two years behind schedule and its costs have slopped 37% over what was initially promised.

“With adversaries like China and Russia rapidly advancing their own military technologies,” the executive order said, “it is essential to prioritize speed, flexibility and innovation to deliver cutting-edge capabilities to our Armed Forces.”

The Pentagon wrings its hands over one of the roots of this predicament – the lack of competition for contract work – but it’s partly its own fault. At a 1993 dinner party now known as the “Last Supper,” then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin urged defense companies to merge with each other. In the afterglow of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the conventional wisdom at the time was that without the antagonism of its main rival, the U.S. military would be spending less. 

The subsequent consolidation of the defense industry was a marvel of corporate wheeling and dealing. What were 51 separate companies during the Clinton administration are now the “Big Five” defense contractors – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman. Together, they account for 15% of the Pentagon’s contract spending, which, defying experts of the early 1990s, has ballooned since the end of the Cold War. The companies’ exalted status doesn’t mean they’ve skimped on PowerPoint presentations, wining and dining, and the occasional arm-twisting. Defense companies spent $70 million on lobbying in 2023, with the Big Five making up the bulk of that.

There’s also the issue of resources that the Pentagon should have been allocating but failed to. The U.S. is responsible for 40% of the world’s military spending, or roughly as much as the next nine countries combined, but somehow little of the cash has gone to keeping up with technology. Astonishingly, the software revolution of the 21^st century pretty much bypassed the Pentagon procurement offices. That finally seems to be changing. A March 6 order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “Directing Modern Software Acquisition to Maximize Lethality,” requires the Pentagon to adopt new, tech-enabled buying practices. 

“While commercial industry has rapidly adjusted to a software-defined product reality,” Hegseth wrote, the Defense Department “has struggled to reframe our acquisition process from a hardware-centric to a software-centric approach. When it comes to software acquisition, we are overdue in pivoting to a performance-based outcome and, as such, it is the Warfighter who pays the price.” 

Artificial intelligence promises to make Pentagon procurement leaner and meaner, an evolution that could be made easier by the Trump administration’s friendly relationship with Silicon Valley. For years, tech bros treated defense contracts as if they spread the avian flu – both Microsoft and Google stepped away from collaborating with the Pentagon, in 2018 and 2019, respectively, after employees revolted. The Defense Department had almost $2 billion budgeted for AI in 2024 but couldn’t “fully identify” how it planned to use the money, the GAO found. Now, a political alliance between Trump and tech entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks could soothe the perceived stigma of tech startups focusing on building weapons systems, making troops safer, and fixing cost overruns and delivery delays in Pentagon purchasing. 

Alexander Karp, CEO of defense surveillance software contractor Palantir Technologies and co-author of “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” has emerged as head cheerleader of the new relationship. He has said he hopes it yields new and better ways for America’s war fighters to find and kill their enemies. “If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it,” he said in the book. “And the same goes for software.” 

Put that on the wish list.