The Pentagon Had a Budget Surplus. Guess What Trump Decided to Do With It.
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As President Donald Trump's “Big, Beautiful Bill” moves into the House for a vote, another budgetary outrage—little noted but quite substantial—is quietly playing out.
It turns out that the Pentagon had removed some “ excess ” money from its account for the Sentinel, the new intercontinental ballistic missile, which had been experiencing enormous cost overruns. The money is left over from the budget passed last year, and the excess stems from a “restructuring” in the program, brought on by a formal audit that the cost overruns triggered.
This could have been good news, if Trump had followed a different path. The surprise savings could have been refunded to the Treasury, or rerouted to some other military program—say, to fund more ammunition for Ukraine, which the Defense Department has halted , supposedly because of shortages in our own stockpiles, or (here's a novel idea) to fill some of the gaps caused by the Trump budget's drastic cuts in domestic programs.
But no, the money—at least $400 million over the next few years, a Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to me—will be spent on converting the luxury 747 passenger plane, which the Qatari emir gave him as a gift this past May , into the next variant of Air Force One. Installing all the communications and other high-tech gear will actually wind up costing closer to $1 billion , according to expert estimates, and probably won't be finished until Trump is out of office—at which point he has suggested that the plane might be retired, in any case, and go on display at the Trump presidential library . Still, Trump is eager to get the conversion going—and to hell with air-defense missiles for Ukraine or health care for poor and middle-class Americans.
Even in the realm of high-cost, high-profile weapons systems, the Sentinel ICBM has racked up extraordinarily outsize overruns . The price tag for building 634 of the missiles—450 of which will go into silos, replacing the current Minuteman ICBMs, with the rest used for spares and testing—has doubled since the program started in 2015. That brings the estimated cost to $141 billion . That does not include the $60 billion needed to maintain the missiles over the next couple of decades—or the $16 billion for their new nuclear-tipped warheads.
Way back in 1983, when Congress still cared about oversight, Democratic Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and Democratic Oklahoma Rep. Dave McCurdy co-sponsored a bill requiring that the Pentagon notify Congress when a weapon exceeded its baseline cost by more than 15 percent. If it overran its initial cost estimate by 50 percent, it would be deemed in “critical breach” of the Nunn-McCurdy law and would be canceled, unless the secretary of defense certified that it was necessary for national security.
This past January, the Sentinel was declared in “critical breach .” This led to the formal review, which spurred the program's restructuring, which resulted in the excess of funds in the current year's account. (It's unclear whether the excess is real or simply a short-term bookkeeping trick. I've asked the Air Force public affairs office for a detailed explanation of the savings, but have not heard back.)
The whole business has raised questions about whether a new ICBM is even necessary. True, the 450 Minuteman missiles have been in the ground for half a century, but they—along with the warheads, the guidance system, the launch-control center, and all of the other components—have been modified several times, to the point where it's barely the same weapon system. Besides, the US has 970 nuclear warheads onboard submarines and more than 500 bombs and cruise missiles on bomber aircraft .
Some have questioned whether we should continue to have land-based ICBMs at all . They are more vulnerable to attack than submarines (which can roam, undetected, beneath the ocean's surface) or bombers (which can take off on short notice). And while the Minuteman missiles were unique in having the power and accuracy to destroy the enemy's blast-hardened missile silos, the submarines' Trident II missiles, which were first deployed in 1990, have the same capability.
It's worth noting, in any case, that the Pentagon is also building a new bomber (the B-21, at $692 million per plane ), new nuclear-missile submarines (the Columbia-class, at $15 billion per boat ), and new warheads and missiles to go with them. In all, the Congressional Budget Office's estimated price tag for the entire nuclear modernization program, over the next 10 years, comes to $946 billion .
Do we need all of this? How much is enough? And “enough” to do what? To deter an attack by an adversary? To “limit damage” if a war breaks out? To “fight and win” a nuclear war, if things escalate? These used to be the subjects of much debate not only among academic strategists but within the Pentagon, the White House, and Congress. No longer. Almost nobody in power is asking these questions. Absolutely nobody is discussing them at any length or in any depth.
Meanwhile, in the brief peek of sunshine, when an accountants' review has produced some savings—a morsel by Pentagon standards (not quite 0.05 percent of this year's total defense budget ) but big money for most other government agencies—Trump has decided to blow it on an emir-gifted, gold-plated ego trip.
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