The problem with most conventional reporting is that there are hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending outside the Pentagon’s annual budget appropriated by Congress. Even a generally authoritative source of global military spending data such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) underestimates U.S. spending by overlooking significant sums outside what Trump calls the Department of War and related budgets. One major example is nuclear weapons spending, which represented around $33.5 billion in net spending for FY 2025. Although nuclear forces are controlled and deployed by the U.S. military, a significant portion of the budget for maintaining and modernizing the nuclear arsenal is allocated through the Department of Energy rather than the Pentagon.

… Unfortunately, there remains ambiguity about the full scale of military spending given the poor state of Pentagon accounting practices, including its inability to pass a financial audit. Members of the public and members of Congress need a full accounting of the military budget to analyse, discuss, and debate the proper size of military spending both on its own and in relation to other non-military funding priorities.

To provide accurate spending figures, Congress should reform its budgeting practices and provide a true total military budget that combines all forms of military and war spending in one place and one true total figure. Congress also should stop appropriating, and thus hiding, money for the military in other agencies’ budgets. Until Congress begins reporting accurate numbers, members of the media and other analysts should stop repeating incomplete congressional spending data and tell the public what the country is really spending on the military and war.