Donald Trump announced Monday that he will propose a $1 trillion military budget as part of his 2026 federal spending request. “One trillion dollars . . . nobody’s seen anything like it,” Trump said. “We’re very cost conscious, but the military is something that we have to build.” Later that day, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth expressed his excitement, posting “COMING SOON: the first TRILLION dollar [Pentagon] budget. Trump is rebuilding our military — and FAST.” He added at the end of the post, “PS: we intend to spend every taxpayer dollar wisely.”

Trump’s “cost conscious” comment — made while boasting about spending a trillion dollars in one year on the military — is absurd. Hegseth’s claim that he’ll “spend every taxpayer dollar wisely” is impossible. The Pentagon has never passed an audit. Last year’s audit found it couldn’t account for 68 percent of its budgetary resources and 44 percent of its assets. How can Hegseth say a dollar was spent wisely when there’s a two-in-three chance the Pentagon can’t provide documentation for how it was spent? And how can he claim the Pentagon needs to buy something when it can’t account for nearly half the stuff it already has?

Another question: Where is the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)? If there’s a worthy target for DOGE leader Elon Musk’s chainsaw austerity, it’s the Pentagon. But that’s pretty much the only place Musk’s DOGE isn’t touching. Instead of eliminating waste at the one federal agency that can’t pass an audit, Musk is eliminating “waste” at all the agencies that can. For example, military contracts make up 60 percent of all federal contracts but account for less than 0.05 percent of the contracts DOGE has terminated. Investigations have found systematic profiteering by contractors on nearly everything the Pentagon buys. Last year, Lockheed Martin — the Pentagon’s top contractor — spent $7 billion on stock buybacks and dividends.

This hypocrisy can be explained by brazen self-interest. Last Friday, the Pentagon announced that it awarded Musk’s SpaceX a $6 billion contract. Musk must have taken one look at the rampant price gouging by military contractors and the hundreds of billions of dollars in military contracts up for grabs each year and thought, “I want in,” and not, “This needs fixing.” DOGE clarifies that the public debate shouldn’t be framed around big-versus-small government, or even efficient-versus-inefficient government. It’s about who the government works for and who it doesn’t. Musk is leveraging DOGE to ensure the government works for him and his businesses.

That explains DOGE’s silence on the trillion-dollar military budget announcement, but what about the Democratic Party’s lack of pushback? If Trump’s budget request matches his rhetoric, it would represent about a $100 billion increase over the 2025 Pentagon budget, which stands at $899 billion. (Politico reported it at $892 billion, but that figure omits the $6.6 billion in emergency military spending quietly approved through the Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2025.)

Trump’s plan is to pair this massive surge in military spending with dramatic cuts to social welfare. House Republicans’ legislative framework for Trump’s agenda requires certain congressional committees to come up with at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. Notably, the blueprint directs the Energy and Commerce Committee — which oversees Medicaid, the health insurance provider for about 80 million people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it — to cut at least $880 billion (compared to a projected ten-year spending baseline).

While Trump and congressional Republicans have reassured voters that they won’t cut Medicaid, meeting their spending reduction target isn’t possible without exacting major cuts to the program’s coverage, benefits, or both. Why? Because Medicaid accounts for 93 percent of the funding under the Energy and Commerce Committee’s jurisdiction. Even if the committee cut everything besides Medicaid, it would still fall $300 billion short of the $880 billion minimum reduction required by the GOP legislation. (Cutting everything but Medicaid and CHIP would leave them $500 billion short.)

Trump, Musk, and Republican leadership are preparing to gut Medicaid benefits while funneling a trillion dollars to the Pentagon. This exemplifies their contradictory and self-serving agenda: defunding critical government services in the name of “efficiency,” while stuffing hundreds of billions of dollars more into an institution practically defined by waste, fraud, and abuse. If Democratic leadership can’t be bothered to craft a coherent political message out of this glaring hypocrisy, they risk more voters concluding that the Democrats are merely cosplaying as an opposition party — and that’s a tough conclusion to argue against.