The White House just put its priorities on paper — and they look exactly like what you’d expect from an administration waging an unauthorized war while telling parents that childcare is someone else’s problem.
President Trump released his fiscal year 2027 budget proposal on Friday, and the numbers tell a story that should worry every American who depends on the federal government for anything other than bombs.
The proposal calls for $1.5 trillion in military spending — a 42% increase over current levels — while slashing $73 billion from everything else. Healthcare. Education. Housing. Environmental protection. Scientific research. Energy assistance for low-income families trying to heat their homes.
All of it gets the ax so the Pentagon can get the largest budget increase since World War II.
A War Budget Disguised as a Government Budget
Let’s be clear about what this proposal actually is. It’s not a plan to govern a country of 330 million people with complex needs. It’s a war budget with a few scraps left over for everything else.
Of that $1.5 trillion military price tag, $1.1 trillion would go directly to the Department of Defense through the normal appropriations process. The remaining $350 billion would be pushed through budget reconciliation — the same procedural trick that lets the Senate bypass the filibuster and pass legislation with a simple majority. That means Republicans could ram through $350 billion in additional war spending without a single Democratic vote.
The budget includes funding for Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense system, $65.8 billion for new Navy ships, and money to replenish munitions that have been burned through during the ongoing war with Iran — now in its fifth week with no end in sight, despite the president’s repeated assurances that it would be wrapped up quickly.
Meanwhile, the budget doesn’t touch Social Security or Medicare’s mandatory spending — not because the administration wants to protect those programs, but because cutting them is considered politically suicidal.
What Gets Cut So the Pentagon Gets Fed
The domestic side of this budget reads like a hit list of programs that help ordinary people survive. The Environmental Protection Agency would be cut in half — a 52% reduction that would eliminate its Superfund cleanup program, clean water funding, and environmental justice initiatives.
The National Science Foundation would lose nearly 55% of its funding. The Small Business Administration would be gutted by 67%.
Here’s a partial rundown of what’s on the chopping block:
The administration frames all of this as eliminating “woke, weaponized, and wasteful programs” and pushing responsibilities down to state governments.
In other words, if your state can’t or won’t fund the programs the federal government used to provide, tough luck.
“We’re Fighting Wars. We Can’t Take Care of Daycare.”
The budget arrived just days after Trump said the quiet part out loud during an Easter event at the White House.
The federal government, he said, can’t be expected to handle daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, or other domestic programs because “we’re fighting wars.”
That statement is the clearest possible expression of this administration’s worldview: the government exists to wage war, and everything else — the health of its citizens, the education of its children, the roofs over people’s heads — is an afterthought that states should figure out on their own.
Rep. Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, pushed back immediately:
“Donald Trump is telling the American people our country somehow can’t afford child care, Medicaid, and Medicare, but is never too stretched to fund wars of choice. He is wrong.
We are the wealthiest country in the world and can absolutely afford to both defend and invest in the American people.
The President is now demanding a massive increase in defense spending, including a $350 billion slush fund for his reckless war with Iran, while cutting billions from health care, education, housing, and more. This budget represents ‘America Last’.
I will be demanding answers from White House OMB Director Russell Vought when he testifies at the House Budget Committee on April 15.”
Rep. Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was more blunt. To fund endless wars, he said, Trump wants the biggest military spending increase in 70 years — paid for with cuts to education, health, and housing. His response was two words: “Hell no.”
A Wish List, Not a Law — But the Priorities Are Real
Presidential budgets are traditionally more about messaging than legislation. Congress controls the purse strings, and lawmakers from both parties have historically ignored large portions of White House budget proposals.
Last year, Trump asked for roughly a 20% cut to nondefense spending, and Congress kept it essentially flat.
Programs the president tried to eliminate entirely — like energy assistance for low-income families — actually got slight funding increases.
But dismissing this budget as a dead letter would be a mistake. It tells you exactly what this administration values and what it doesn’t.
It tells you that a Pentagon that still can’t pass a basic audit deserves a half-trillion-dollar raise, while families struggling to afford groceries deserve nothing.
It tells you that $10 billion for beautifying Washington, D.C. and $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a prison are priorities, but cancer research and clean water are not.
As Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project put it, the president looked at a country where nearly half the population struggles to afford basic necessities and decided what Americans really need is a bigger war budget.
The Bigger Picture
This budget comes on top of the $170 billion Congress already approved last year for immigration enforcement and deportation operations — funding that has enabled deaths in detention centers, the imprisonment of children, and the deaths of U.S. citizens caught up in mass deportation raids.
It comes as the Department of Homeland Security has been partially shut down for over a month because Democrats are demanding reforms to ICE.
And it comes as the administration is simultaneously requesting another $200 billion specifically for the Iran war — a figure that hasn’t even been formally submitted to Congress yet.
Add it all up and you’re looking at an administration that has found a bottomless well of money for war, deportation, and vanity projects while telling working families that their needs are simply too expensive.
Robert Weissman of Public Citizen called the proposal “a moral obscenity.”
That $500 billion military increase alone, he pointed out, would be enough to meaningfully address healthcare, childcare, the climate crisis, affordable housing, education, and college costs — if it were spent on people instead of weapons.
Instead, it’s going to a Pentagon run by Pete Hegseth, an agency that can’t account for the money it already has.
The question now is whether Congress will rubber-stamp this vision of a country that exists solely to wage war — or whether enough lawmakers from both parties will recognize that:
“A government that can’t take care of its own people has already failed at its most basic job.”
