Majority of tax dollars go to war under Trump as domestic programs face deepest cuts
Well it’s tax season again. Do you know where your tax dollars actually go?
As federal budgeting experts, we get asked about this a lot—often, it’s something people simply have no idea about.
But if you’ve watched the Trump administration launch one war after another, flood the streets of American cities with Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents, and call the very idea of an affordability crisis a “hoax” by their political opponents, you might be getting the general idea.
Around half of Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities. But last year, instead of investing in programs that help people make ends meet, the president and his friends in Congress passed a Big Ugly Bill that cut taxes for the wealthy, slashed health insurance and food assistance for millions of Americans, and added billions in new spending for war and mass deportations.
You spent about 50 days working and paying taxes last year just to feed the war machine—and 23 days working to pay those Pentagon contractors and their millionaire CEOs.
Some of those changes, such as the deepest cuts to health insurance, won’t take effect until 2026 or later. Others are taking effect now and are visible in the war on Iran and the deployment of mass deportation forces in our cities.
These enormous sums for the Pentagon and militarism more broadly—now well over $1 trillion—come with enormous costs to ordinary people. That’s true not just in terms of the opportunity cost for other programs, but also for the drain on our wallets.
In a new report for the Institute for Policy Studies, we broke down last year’s typical tax bill and what each household actually spent, on average, for different programs and priorities in 2025.
We learned, for example, that the average taxpayer paid $4,049 for weapons and war last year—a huge sum in a time of rising costs of living and stagnant wages. That’s far, far more than any other program funded by income tax dollars. Medicaid, the next highest item on our income tax receipt, ran a little under $2,500—and that funds healthcare for 1 in 5 Americans. School lunches and other nutrition programs, by comparison, ran just $124. The Postal Service? $19. (Big programs like Social Security and Medicare have their own dedicated funding streams, and aren’t as significant for your income taxes.)
More than half of the Pentagon’s sum went to private, for-profit military contractors—the top CEOs of which now make over $25 million a year on average. Put another way, you spent about 50 days working and paying taxes last year just to feed the war machine—and 23 days working to pay those Pentagon contractors and their millionaire CEOs.
The war in Iran hadn’t started yet when you were paying taxes last year. But if we use last year’s tax data and set the cost for the war at $35 billion—a line we’re likely on the verge of crossing—the average taxpayer will have paid $130 for the war on Iran. And that becomes a double whammy when you count the many hundreds more at the gas pump, grocery store, or on other expenses made worse because of the conflict.
Polls show that Americans don’t want this war that’s causing so many deaths in Iran and elsewhere at the same time people here in the US are left to struggle. Unfortunately, nobody in this administration asked us.
Meanwhile, programs that actually help people trying to make ends meet—a growing population of us, unfortunately—are getting cut. As more of those cuts take effect—especially to Medicaid—the gap between what we spend on the Pentagon and everything else will only keep growing.
Worse still, Trump and his allies are planning a repeat of last year’s Big Ugly Bill. The president has requested $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon next year—a huge increase from the $1 trillion budget this year. That would make the numbers all the more lopsided.
Nobody loves paying taxes, but we all agree we should get our money’s worth. And in a democracy, our hard-earned tax dollars should go toward programs that actually keep us safe and healthy.
Before plowing more money into the war machine, we need to take a long, hard look at how policymakers are using our money. Americans want a government that supports them when times are tough—not one that shakes us down for endless wars.