President Donald Trump has unveiled his budget request for the next fiscal year. The outline, which is unlikely to be enacted, recommends cuts to many agencies and programs. But it also wants a 13 percent increase for the Pentagon—among other things, to fund the F-47 Next Generation Air Dominance platform, which the White House calls the “most advanced, capable, and lethal aircraft ever built.”
Trump’s budget request would cost taxpayers $1.613 trillion—the same amount as last year’s budget. The money would not go to the same places, though. Under the new proposal, only four arms of the government would receive more money than they did in fiscal year 2025: an additional $42.3 billion for the Department of Homeland Security (a nearly 65 percent increase), $1.5 billion more for the Transportation Department, $5.4 billion more for the Department of Veterans Affairs, and $113 billion more for the Department of Defense.
The proposal specifies that the Pentagon’s money should be spent on developing a “Golden Dome for America,” a missile defense system; on expanding shipbuilding; on U.S. “space dominance”; on modernizing the nuclear arsenal; on a 3.8 percent pay raise to servicemen; and on the F-47 fighter aircraft.
While the request does not detail how much of the budget would be allocated to each program, we know that the government spent a lot on the F-47’s predecessor. The cost of F-35 fighter jet procurement doubled from $200 billion in October 2001 to nearly $400 billion by 2022. The F-35 is now projected to cost more than $2 trillion over the length of its lifespan, according to the Government Accountability Office. There are more than 630 F-35s currently in service, and the Pentagon plans to acquire an additional 1,800.
Those thousands of F-35s are supposed to be in service until 2088, raising questions about why we need to invest in its replacement more than six decades ahead of time.
What’s more, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, Gen. David W. Allvin, announced in March that the country will be “leaning into a new chapter of aerial warfare” with General Atomics’ YFQ-42A and Anduril’s YFQ-44A unmanned fighter aircraft. Why exactly are we committing untold billions to develop a manned sixth-generation fighter?
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