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Pentagon provided $2.4tn to private arms firms to ‘fund war and weapons’, report finds

Andrew Roth

A new study of defense department spending previewed exclusively to the Guardian shows that most of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was described as a “continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing”.

The report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Costs of War program at Brown University said that the Trump administration’s new Pentagon budget will push annual US military spending past the $1tn mark.

That will deliver a projected windfall of more than half a trillion dollars that will be shared among top arms firms such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as well as a growing military tech sector with close allies in the administration such as JD Vance, the report said.

The report is compiled of statistics of Pentagon spending and contracts from 2020 to 2024, during which time the top five Pentagon contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman) received $771bn in contract awards. Overall, private firms received approximately 54% of the department’s discretionary spending of $4.4tn over that period.

Taking into account supplemental funding for the Pentagon passed by Congress under Trump’s flagship sweeping tax and spending bill, the report said, the US military budget will have nearly doubled this century, increasing 99% since 2000.

“The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in September 2021 did not result in a peace dividend,” the authors of the report wrote. “Instead, President Biden requested, and Congress authorized, even higher annual budgets for the Pentagon, and President Trump is continuing that same trajectory of escalating military budgets.”

That contradicts early indications from Trump in February that he could cut military spending in half, adding that he would tell China and Russia that “there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1tn on the military … and I’m going to say we can spend this on other things”. Instead, the spending bill pushed by Trump through Congress included a $157bn spending boost for the Pentagon.