Earlier this month, President Donald Trump released his federal budget for 2026. The following figures give an overall sense of what the administration is proposing:
- Total discretionary funding requested: $1.69 trillion
- Military spending: $1.01 trillion
- Military spending as a share of the total: 60%
- Military spending as a share of the FY2025 total (for comparison): 49%
- Nonmilitary spending: $679 billion
- Nonmilitary spending as a share of total: 40%
- Share of “nonmilitary” spending for the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Veterans Affairs: 40%
- Funding for departments whose primary purpose isn’t military, military adjacent, or policing: $412 billion
- Share of total requested funding for those departments: 24%
Figure 1
Let’s break it down more carefully.
Figure 2 below compares Trump’s 2026 funding request to enacted 2025 levels for the 15 executive cabinet departments, sorted by the difference between those amounts. At one end, you’ll find the largest proposed increase (+$113 billion for the Pentagon); at the other, the largest proposed cut (–$49 billion for the State Department and international programs).
However, departmental-level breakdowns understate how much military spending there actually is — and how much nonmilitary spending there actually isn’t. For example, Figure 2 lists $962 billion for the Pentagon, but that figure excludes military spending housed in other departments. Factor those amounts in, and you get the $1.01 trillion military budget shown on page 43 of the White House proposal and in Figure 1…
Auteur: Stephen Semler
