Would You Trust Pete Hegseth With $1.5 Trillion of Your Money?
May 13, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET
Credit... By Noah Shachtman
nytimes.com/…5/13/opinion/hegseth-pentagon-milita…
Mr. Shachtman, a contributing Opinion writer, is a longtime national security reporter.nytimes.com/…5/13/opinion/hegseth-pentagon-milita…
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently asked Congress for a staggering amount of money: $1.5 trillion. That’s a more than 40 percent increase from last year’s also incomprehensible Pentagon budget and the equivalent of the annual revenues of Amazon, Google’s parent company and Apple combined.
Technically, officially, Mr. Hegseth’s $1.5 trillion was a budget request, and it had thousands of pages of figures and line items to go with it. But what’s even more astonishing than its size is that it wasn’t really a budget, not in the way you or I would think of it.
The word “budget” ordinarily implies picking among options, living within your means. Earlier military budgets, even …More