Hegseth calls allied defense ‘bad deal for taxpayers’ in budget push

By Brett Rowland
The Center Square

The Pentagon wants the largest nominal military budget in American history despite failing eight consecutive financial audits and continuing to face longstanding financial management challenges.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pressed the case Saturday at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual Asia-Pacific security summit in Singapore, urging U.S. allies to boost defense spending to at least 3.5% of their gross domestic product and assume a larger share of regional security costs.

Hegseth spoke days before the House Armed Services Committee takes up the $1.14 trillion base of President Donald Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion request.

“For too long, the security of this region has rested disproportionately on American military power,” Hegseth said. “While many of our allies and partners allowed their own defense capabilities to atrophy, that’s a bad deal for the American taxpayer and it is an unsustainable crutch for our allies and partners.”

“The era of the United States subsidizing the defense of wealthy nations is over,” he said. “We need partners, not protectorates. We seek alliances built on shared responsibility, not dependency.”

Trump’s $1.5 trillion request for fiscal year 2027 represents a 42% increase over current defense funding levels, according to the Department of War. It includes $1.14 trillion through the National Defense Authorization Act, which the Armed Services Committee will mark up Thursday, with the Senate Armed Services Committee setting its own markup for June 10.

The budget also includes $350 billion through a separate reconciliation bill, a procedural vehicle that requires only a simple majority for passage.

The Pentagon has not released a supplemental funding request related to the conflict in Iran. Acting Comptroller Jules Hurst told Congress on April 29 that the war had cost about $25 billion. He updated the figure to about $29 billion at a May 12 hearing, citing equipment repairs, replacement costs and operational expenses.

The president’s budget would fund construction of the Golden Dome missile defense shield, the largest shipbuilding request since 1962, a tripling of drone and counter-drone spending, and a nearly doubled Space Force budget.

It also calls for adding 44,000 service members and a pay raise for military personnel.

The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative watchdog, warned that the Pentagon’s new audit strategy appears “more focused on bookkeeping” than correcting systemic weaknesses.

“Even if under the new approach DOD achieves a clean audit opinion by the end of 2028, the department’s financial management will likely still be on the high-risk list,” Asif Khan, the GAO’s director of financial management and assurance, told Congress on May 14.

Hurst had previously pushed back on the idea that Congress should be hesitant to fund the agency because of its audit challenges, telling reporters at an April 21 Pentagon budget briefing:

“Tracking obligations has never been an issue for us passing an audit,” he said. “We buy a nuclear missile in the 1970s and then we have to account for the present-day value, which includes every single repair or modification we made of that missile over 50-plus years. That’s the kind of stuff that makes it hard for the department to get an audit; it’s not tracking our funding in the year of execution.”

The audit debate has taken on added significance as the administration seeks a sharp increase in military spending.

The budget request arrives as a Peter G. Peterson Foundation survey shows voter confidence in the nation’s finances at a two-year low. The national debt stands at $39 trillion, and the federal government is projected to post a $2 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2026.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated in January that maintaining defense spending at the proposed level over the next decade, combined with associated borrowing costs, would add $5.8 trillion to the national debt.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation survey, conducted jointly by Democratic and Republican polling firms, found that 93% of voters are concerned that the national debt’s effect on inflation is increasing the cost of living.

CRFB, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, urged lawmakers to slow down.

“Before Congress considers an enormous expansion of the defense budget, they should work to understand what previously-appropriated dollars are still available and make sure existing dollars are being spent wisely and cost-effectively,” the group said in a May 27 statement, noting the Pentagon has received $4.6 trillion in defense funding over the past five years, with much of last year’s $173 billion in mandatory defense funding appearing to remain unspent.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., argued the budget increase was overdue.

“For the first time in 40 years, we’ve been presented a budget that accounts for the true cost of American deterrence,” Rogers said in April.

Not all lawmakers agreed. Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, called the proposal “a bloated, undisciplined budget” when it was released in April.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said increases need to be offset elsewhere.

“We need to not grow deficits,” he said.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois, who attended the Shangri-La Dialogue and met with Indo-Pacific defense officials the same week as Hegseth’s speech, pushed back on the administration’s approach.

“It would be a mistake to rely only on the might of our military to solve every problem,” she said in a video posted to her official Senate YouTube channel on May 29.