President Donald Trump has drawn intense scrutiny over his alleged plan to secure a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded settlement, but another White House proposal – one with a price tag more than 880 times larger – has gone largely ignored, journalist Ken Klippenstein argued on Friday.
That proposal is the $1.5 trillion in defense spending for fiscal year 2027, a proposal that came from the White House and represents a $400 billion increase over the previous year. The White House is also asking for an additional $200 billion to cover costs associated with the president’s deeply unpopular war against Iran.
Klippenstein argued that, while the increase in defense spending was staggering, it was what was buried within the proposal that led him to label the request as “the military’s biggest taxpayer heist ever.”
“Sure, we all know about the $600 toilet seats, the soldiers sent to war without proper armor, the drone threat nobody planned for,” Klippenstein wrote in an analysis published Friday on his Substack. “But those seem almost quaint compared to the biggest problem these days: the billions spent on the kind of business model ‘innovation’ [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth [has described], supposedly to speed things up or take advantage of ‘commercial’ offerings.”
The “innovation” Klippenstein was referring to was the countless number of Pentagon organizations that have sprung up since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which by Klippenstein’s count have reached at least 211.
“I’m not even talking about the research laboratories that have been around for decades; or the normal [research and development] orgs that exist; or the regular ‘materiel’ commands of the services. I’m talking about 211 organizations created since the second Iraq War because those existing organizations obviously and evidently didn’t do their jobs,” Klippenstein wrote.
“Organizations, plural! One organization exists today, another pops up tomorrow. They are their own universe, an army that marches to its own cadence. Will Hegseth slash them? No. Instead, we’re sure to see the creation of a new Business United Thoughtful Futures Cell (BUTFUC) to spread the extra $400 billion around.”