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Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” Is a Huge Win for the Military-Industrial Complex [1]

['William D. Hartung', 'Jeet Heer', 'Ben Schwartz', 'Isaac Rabbani', 'Dave Zirin', 'Corbin Trent', 'Various Contributors', 'Deb Vanasse', 'Sarah Anderson', 'Lauren Jacobs']

Date: 2025-07-03 14:57:21+00:00

Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” Is a Huge Win for the Military-Industrial Complex While weapons contractors will gorge on a huge new infusion of cash, military personnel, past and present, are clearly going to be neglected.

A Boeing B-52H bomber in flight, August 2020.

(Rob Reedman / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

The Senate is on the verge of passing the distinctly misnamed “big, beautiful bill.” It is, in fact, one of the ugliest pieces of legislation to come out of Congress in living memory. The version that passed the House recently would cut $1.7 trillion, mostly in domestic spending, while providing the top 5 percent of taxpayers with roughly $1.5 trillion in tax breaks.

Over the next few years, the same bill will add another $150 billion to a Pentagon budget already soaring toward a record $1 trillion. In short, as of now, in the battle between welfare and warfare, the militarists are carrying the day.

Pentagon Pork and the People It Harms

The bill, passed by the House of Representatives and at present under consideration in the Senate, would allocate tens of billions of dollars to pursue President Trump’s cherished but hopeless Golden Dome project, which Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has described as “a fantasy.” She explained exactly why the Golden Dome, which would supposedly protect the United States against nuclear attack, is a pipe dream:

Over the last 60 years, the United States has spent more than $350 billion on efforts to develop a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. This effort has been plagued by false starts and failures, and none have yet been demonstrated to be effective against a real-world threat.… Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the U.S. safe from nuclear weapons.

The bill also includes billions more for shipbuilding, heavy new investments in artillery and ammunition, and funding for next-generation combat aircraft like the F-47.

Oh, and after all of those weapons programs get their staggering cut of that future Pentagon budget, somewhere way down at the bottom of that list is a line item for improving the quality of life for active-duty military personnel. But the share aimed at the well-being of soldiers, sailors, and airmen (and women) is less than 6 percent of the $150 billion that Congress is now poised to add to that department’s already humongous budget. And that’s true despite the way Pentagon budget hawks invariably claim that the enormous sums they routinely plan on shoveling into it—and the overflowing coffers of the contractors it funds—are “for the troops.”

Much of the funding in the bill will flow into the districts of key members of Congress (to their considerable political benefit). For example, the Golden Dome project will send billions of dollars to companies based in Huntsville, Alabama, which calls itself “Rocket City” because of the dense network of outfits there working on both offensive missiles and missile defense systems. And that, of course, is music to the ears of Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), the current chair of the House Armed Services Committee, who just happens to come from Alabama.

The shipbuilding funds will help prop up arms makers like HII Corporation (formerly Huntington Ingalls), which runs a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the home state of Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS). The funds will also find their way to shipyards in Maine, Connecticut, and Virginia.

Those funds will benefit the cochairs of the House Shipbuilding Caucus, Representative Joe Courtney (D-CT) and Representative Rob Wittman (R-VA). Connecticut hosts General Dynamics’ Electric Boat plant, which makes submarines that carry ballistic missiles, while Virginia is home to HII Corporation’s Newport News Shipbuilding facility, which makes both aircraft carriers and attack submarines.

The Golden Dome missile defense project, on which President Trump has promised to spend $175 billion over the next three years, will benefit contractors big and small. Those include companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon (now RTX) that build current generation missile defense systems, as well as emerging military tech firms like Elon Musk’s Space X and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, both of which are rumored to have a shot at playing a leading role in the development of the new anti-missile system.

And just in case you thought this country was only planning to invest in defense against a nuclear strike, a sharp upsurge in spending on new nuclear warheads under the auspices of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) has been proposed for fiscal year 2026. Thirty billion dollars, to be exact, which would represent a 58 percent hike from the prior year’s budget. Meanwhile, within that agency, nonproliferation, cleanup, and renewable energy programs are set to face significant cuts, leaving 80 percent of NNSA’s proposed funding to be spent on—yes!—nuclear weapons alone. Those funds will flow to companies like Honeywell, Bechtel, Jacobs Engineering, and Fluor that help run nuclear labs and nuclear production sites, as well as educational institutions like the University of Tennessee, Texas A&M, and the University of California at Berkeley, which help manage nuclear weapons labs or nuclear production sites.

Weakening the Social Safety Net—and America

And while weapons contractors will gorge on a huge new infusion of cash, military personnel, past and present, are clearly going to be neglected. As a start, the Veterans Administration is on the block for deep cuts, including possible layoffs of up to 80,000 employees—a move that would undoubtedly slow down the processing of benefits for those who have served in America’s past wars. Research on ailments that disproportionately impact veterans will also be cut, which should be considered an outrage.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of veterans from this country’s disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will continue to suffer from physical and psychological wounds, including traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. Cutting research that might find more effective solutions to such problems should be considered a national disgrace. In the meantime, active-duty personnel who are getting a tiny fraction of the potential Pentagon add-on of $150 billion are similarly in need.

Worse yet, turn away from the Pentagon for a moment, and the cuts in the rest of that “big, beautiful bill” will likely have an impact on a majority of Americans—Democrats, independents, and MAGA Republicans alike. Their full effects may not be felt for months until the spending reductions contained in it start hitting home. However, enacting policies that take food off people’s tables and deny them medical care will not only cause unnecessary suffering but cost lives.

As President (and former general) Dwight D. Eisenhower, a very different kind of Republican, said more than 70 years ago, the ultimate security of a nation lies not in how many weapons it can pile up, but in the health, education, and resilience of its people. The big beautiful bill and the divisive politics surrounding it threaten those foundations of our national strength.

Clash of the Contractors?

As budget cuts threaten to make the population weaker, distorted spending priorities are making arms producers stronger. The Big Five—Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—produce most of the current big-ticket weapon systems, from submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles to tanks, combat aircraft, and missile-defense systems. Meanwhile, emerging tech firms like Palantir, Anduril, and Space X are cashing in on contracts for unpiloted vehicles, advanced communications systems, new-age goggles for the Army, anti-drone systems, and so much more.

But even as weapons spending hits near-record or record levels, there may still be a fight between the Big Five and the emerging tech firms over who gets the biggest share of that budget. One front in the coming battle between the Big Five and the Silicon Valley militarists could be the Army Transformation Initiative. According to Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, one of the goals of ATI is to “eliminate obsolete systems.”

Driscoll is a harsh critic of the way members of Congress put money in the budget—a process known as “pork barrel politics”—for items the military services haven’t even asked for (and they ask for plenty), simply because those systems might bring more jobs and revenue to their states or districts. He has, in fact, committed himself to an approach that’s incompatible with the current, parochial process of putting together the Pentagon budget. “Lobbyists and bureaucrats have overtaken the army’s ability to prioritize soldiers and war fighting,” he insisted.

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[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/big-beautiful-bill-military-industrial-complex/

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