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drudge.com: https://drudge.com/news/292080/hegseths-15-trillion-budget-slammed

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Published
Monday, May 18, 2026

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Hegseth's $1.5 Trillion Budget Slammed as 'Slush Fund' | Drudge Retort Advertisement Sunday, May 17, 2026 Hegseth's $1.5 Trillion Budget Slammed as 'Slush Fund' 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. Posted by qcp at 08:33 PM | 7 COMMENTS | permalink | Comment on This Entry | Menu Front Page Breaking News Comments Flagged Comments Recently Flagged User Blogs Write a Blog Entry Create a Poll Edit Account Weekly Digest Stats Page RSS Feed Back Page Advertisement Subscriptions Read the Retort using RSS. RSS Feed Author Info qcp Joined 200

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Hegseth's $1.5 Trillion Budget Slammed as 'Slush Fund' | Drudge Retort Advertisement Sunday, May 17, 2026 Hegseth's $1.5 Trillion Budget Slammed as 'Slush Fund' 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. Posted by qcp at 08:33 PM | 7 COMMENTS | permalink | Comment on This Entry | Menu Front Page Breaking News Comments Flagged Comments Recently Flagged User Blogs Write a Blog Entry Create a Poll Edit Account Weekly Digest Stats Page RSS Feed Back Page Advertisement Subscriptions Read the Retort using RSS. RSS Feed Author Info qcp Joined 2007/07/05 Visited 2026/05/16 Status: user MORE STORIES 49,000 Lake Tahoe Residents Have One Year to Find New Power (1 comments) ... Hegseth's $1.5 Trillion Budget Slammed as 'Slush Fund' (7 comments) ... Trump Wants Iran’s Uranium Mostly for 'Public Relations' (3 comments) ... Phoenix police fire sergeant who brought gun to ICE protest (3 comments) ... US Power Prices Climb 61% Faster Than Inflation (51 comments) ... More Alternate links: Google News | Twitter Trump and Hegseth thought this war was going to be won with bombs. Iran had a different plan. [image or embed] -- Ron Filipkowski ( @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social ) 6:02 PM · May 15, 2026 Comments Admin's note: Participants in this discussion must follow the site's moderation policy . Profanity will be filtered. Abusive conduct is not allowed. More: 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 the most gigantic ones, made trade-offs " canceled weapons programs, deferred maintenance, smaller fighting forces, to name a few. Mr. Hegseth's plan avoids those choices almost entirely. It would funnel more money to the traditional military contractors that Mr. Hegseth previously called out for feasting on a wasteful, bloated system. It would bankroll President Trump's weirdly retro military wish list. On top of all that, Mr. Hegseth has asked Congress for $350 billion that would come with far less oversight or accountability than the rest of the sum. And that's before the bill for the Iran war comes due; the Pentagon estimates it has cost $29 billion so far, up from an estimate of $25 billion a few weeks ago. "They're just doing an all-of-the-above approach," says Todd Harrison, a military budget expert at the traditionally right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, so that they "don't have to make difficult choices." Mr. Hegseth's team says it needs flexibility in

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