The White House has submitted a $1.5 trillion military spending request to Congress — not to defend American soil, but to sustain a pattern of offensive military action the administration has carried out against Venezuela, Iran, and others, none of which posed an imminent threat to the United States.
Said President Trump: "We're fighting wars" — offered as the reason ordinary Americans cannot have childcare, Medicaid, or Medicare.
The Founders gave Congress the power to declare war and hold the purse for a reason. The defense appropriations bill is the last remaining check Congress holds over an executive that has already brushed off war powers resolutions. What Congress votes on next is not a budget line. It is a question of honor.
On January 17, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower — Supreme Allied Commander, five-star general, two-term president — delivered his farewell address to the nation. He did not warn about communism. He warned about us.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Eisenhower knew the machine from the inside. He also presided over a top marginal income tax rate of 91 percent — not because he was a radical, but because he believed a republic could not sustain permanent war footing without asking those who profited most to pay their share. He was a soldier who understood that the greatest threat to a free people is not always the enemy at the gate. Sometimes it is the contractor at the Capitol.
Sixty-five years later, Congress is being asked to approve $1.5 trillion in military spending in a single budget request.
The U.S. defense budget has grown by nearly 200 percent over the past quarter century, according to Oxfam America’s director of Peace and Security, Scott Paul, writing in The Hill. Meanwhile, the social safety net for working and middle-class families has been cut back year after year.
This budget request arrives after a period in which U.S. forces have carried out strikes against Venezuela and Iran — nations that posed no imminent threat to American soil — and the administration has issued explicit military threats toward Greenland, Mexico, and Panama. The President himself renamed the Department of Defense the “Department of War.” That had no legal force, but it had the force of a confession.
The President’s own framing is the clearest receipt we have. He told the American people that the country cannot afford healthcare or childcare because, in his words, “we’re fighting wars.” That is not a defense posture. That is a war economy — and it is being built on the backs of the same working families who send their sons and daughters to serve.
The Constitution is not ambiguous. Article I, Section 8 grants Congress — not the executive — the power to declare war and to fund the armed forces. The Founders did not design a republic where one man could commit the nation to open-ended military aggression while Congress rubber-stamps the bill.
Lincoln understood this. As a young congressman in 1848, he challenged President Polk to name the exact spot on American soil where blood had been shed to justify the Mexican-American War. He called it the President’s prerogative to “fix on the spot.” That was constitutional courage. What we have now is constitutional silence.
Congress has let war powers resolutions die on procedural votes. It has let oversight hearings become theater. The defense appropriations bill is not one lever among many — it is the last lever. And most members still treat it as a ritual vote for “supporting the troops,” as if writing a $1.5 trillion check in the dark is the same thing as honoring the men and women who serve.
Honoring those who serve means not spending their lives cheaply. It means not putting them in harm’s way to settle political scores or extract natural resources from sovereign neighbors. Eisenhower said the same thing, wearing five stars when he said it.
The West Point Cadet Honor Code asks cadets to choose the harder right over the easier wrong. The harder right here is clear: Congress must ask what this money is actually for, who profits when it is spent, and whether it serves the defense of the republic or something else entirely.
The easier wrong is another deferential vote, another blank check, and another generation that learns too late what Eisenhower already knew.