WASHINGTON >> With the United States at war with Iran and embroiled in conflicts around the world, the White House asked Congress today to approve about $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year. If enacted, that amount would set military spending at its highest level in modern history.

The request, which arrived as part of President Donald Trump’s new budget, would amount to a roughly 40% increase from what the United States spent on the Pentagon this fiscal year. The administration coupled the proposal with a call for $73 billion in cuts spread across many domestic agencies, including the elimination of key federal health, housing and education programs, some of which serve minority groups and the poor.

The ideas add up to a fiscal blueprint that could add trillions of dollars to the brimming federal debt, if Congress opts to translate the president’s full vision into law without other changes to the nation’s balance sheet. But such an outcome seemed highly unlikely, given that Republicans united with Democrats only months earlier to reject the president’s last proposal for dramatic spending cuts.

This year, Trump urged Congress to approve most of the new defense money — more than $1.1 trillion — as part of its regular work to fund the government and to enact the remaining $350 billion using the same special legislative tactic that allowed Republicans to clinch their tax cuts in 2025. Such a move could also enable GOP leaders to boost funding for the president’s mass deportations despite Democrats’ objections.

In the days before releasing his plan, the president and his aides framed the proposed increase for defense in urgent terms, citing a need to restock munitions and other supplies as the war with Iran continued. At one point, Trump indicated at a private lunch that military spending needed to be a national priority, even at the expense of federal safety-net programs and other government aid.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis.” He added that the focus had to be “military protection.”

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But Democrats and Republicans have recently expressed a shared unease about raising military spending to the extent Trump has suggested, fretting that the administration had failed to keep them updated about the status of the Iran war, which is now in its fifth week.

Nor have lawmakers always responded favorably to some of the president’s proposed cuts for agencies and programs that serve millions of American families and businesses.

Still, the White House asked Congress today to slash domestic spending by about 10%, targeting core government services, including money meant to respond to natural disasters, train new teachers, root out tax fraud, research cures for diseases and develop clean energy technology.

Some of the most severe cuts would reduce or eliminate funding that benefits minority groups and their communities, under the presumption that the spending — meant to expand access to lending, bolster minority-owned businesses and combat housing discrimination — is “woke,” “weaponized” or facilitates “cultural Marxism.” So, too, did the administration aim to scrap money designed to reduce racial disparities in health and those supporting LGBTQ+ people.

Other funds targeted by Trump extend critical assistance to the poor, including federal aid that helps Americans afford their heating and cooling bills, which the president seeks to eliminate.

And in the wake of two shutdowns that left workers at the Transportation Security Administration without pay, snarling airports nationwide, the White House budget proposed to begin “the privatization of TSA’s airport screeners.”

The administration signaled it would reserve its most significant increases for law enforcement, including more than $40 billion for the Justice Department, a 13% bump. Some of that money is meant to promote “robust enforcement” of immigration laws. The budget further sets aside $10 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the source of a dispute between Democrats and Republicans that has shuttered the Homeland Security Department for weeks.

“The 2027 budget builds on the president’s vision by continuing to constrain nondefense spending and reform the federal government,” Russ Vought, the White House budget director, said in a letter preceding the proposal.

He added that the approach “would ensure that the United States continues to maintain the world’s most powerful and capable military.”

Overall, the president requested almost $2.2 trillion in spending for the 2027 fiscal year, which would cover the period from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, 2027. His proposal addressed only the agencies and programs that must be funded on a yearly basis, a small fraction of the overall federal ledger, while offering no update on the future of entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

The White House also offered a complicated forecast for the government’s own finances, months after slashing taxes while imposing tariffs on imports from around the world. The administration predicted that revenues would rise next fiscal year, compared with 2026, citing strong economic growth, even though the war with Iran has recently led many economists to question the White House and its assumptions.

On Capitol Hill, Trump’s proposal quickly stoked early bipartisan criticism. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the chair of the chamber’s appropriations panel, took issue with the president’s attempt once again to reduce spending on medical research, education and other programs.

“After careful review,” she said in a statement, “Congress decisively rejected these particular cuts last year.”

Many Democrats fiercely criticized the president for bolstering military spending at the expense of Americans’ needs. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the chamber’s Appropriations Committee, said Trump “wants Congress to defund dozens of programs that help students so that he can send other people’s kids to fight a war with no justification.”

Nevertheless, the president’s blueprint does not carry the force of law; only lawmakers have the authority under the Constitution to set the nation’s spending levels. But Trump has at times upset that balance by claiming that he possesses vast powers to control the nation’s purse strings and carry out his budgetary vision, even without the express approval of Congress.

Over the first year of his second term, the president closed agencies and programs he disliked, dismissed thousands of federal workers across the bureaucracy, and halted billions in congressionally enacted funds for health, education, foreign aid, public broadcasting and more. The actions frequently drew widespread political rebukes and hundreds of legal challenges, many of which have not resolved in the president’s favor.

The roughly $1.5 trillion sought for the Pentagon next fiscal year would amount to about 4.5% of the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its economic output, according to Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution. By that measure, it would be the largest year-over-year increase for defense since the Korean War, her analysis showed, after adjusting for inflation.

The request comes less than a year after Trump secured about $150 billion in extra funding for the Pentagon as part of Republicans’ sweeping tax cut package. The government has raced to disburse those funds in recent months while pursuing additional money to help fund the war with Iran. The new money in 2027 would allow the government to increase pay for the military’s most junior personnel, develop new munitions and produce more naval vessels.

Marc Goldwein, a senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates deficit reduction, said the president’s increases could exacerbate the federal debt, which now stands at nearly $39 trillion.

Without other substantial changes to federal spending and tax revenue, another half trillion in new military spending could total about $5 trillion to $6 trillion to that imbalance over the next decade, according to an analysis prepared before the budget was released. That number includes interest on what the government already owes.

Yet Trump has insisted that he can close the nation’s fiscal imbalance, particularly by slashing spending. His 2027 budget is replete with attempts to overhaul entire agencies, much of which lawmakers have already considered and rejected in recent months.

The White House asked Congress to halve funding at the Environmental Protection Agency, part of a series of moves meant to eliminate the government’s work on climate change. Much as it tried last year, the administration also proposed to cut $15 billion in existing funding from the Energy Department for renewable energy, battery manufacturing and technologies that can remove carbon dioxide from the air.

On health, the budget tracked closely with the priorities and grievances of both Trump and his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The proposal called for $111.1 billion in “discretionary” spending for the Department of Health and Human Services, which Kennedy leads, a 12.5% decrease.

It reiterated Kennedy’s call to consolidate numerous health programs under a new “Administration for a Healthy America” — a riff on the secretary’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. But the creation of AHA, as the proposed agency is known, is currently tied up in litigation.

In some cases, the White House framed its cuts as part of a broader campaign to protect taxpayer dollars and prevent government waste and fraud. To that end, the White House today asked Congress to approve $30 million to assist its new fraud crackdown, which Vice President JD Vance is leading.

Since announcing that campaign, Trump has primarily targeted funds sent to cities and states led by Democrats, which have resisted his immigration policies or sought to halt money under programs he disfavors. Citing a desire to protect taxpayer dollars, his administration has already tried to block billions of dollars in federal funding for child care, public health, nutrition, transportation and more, even though Congress has not expressly allowed it.

Trump suggested today that he would continue to wage the anti-fraud campaign in a political manner, asserting on social media that he and Vance would focus “primarily” in “Blue States.”

“The numbers are so large that, if successful, we would literally be able to balance our American Budget,” the president said. Fiscal experts widely and vigorously dispute this claim.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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