An eye-popping new report reveals that private military contractors are getting rich off Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act with little accountability. The budget allocates $156 billion annually to the Pentagon and other military expenditures through 2029, in addition to expenditures in the National Defense Authorization Act.
Researchers say “a substantial portion” of these funds go directly to a select few private military contractors — the same firms that have spent hundreds of millions seeking favor with top lawmakers.
According to a new joint report from Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Stimson Center, the open-ended reconciliation bill “effectively [makes] it a slush fund” for the defense industry, “incentiviz[ing] future lawmakers to skirt the regular budget process, which is more deliberative and transparent” than the closed-door reconciliation process.
By funding the Pentagon through mandatory rather than discretionary spending, lawmakers can provide ever-increasing bumps to the military budget while skirting traditional debate and checks.
“It is highly unusual for lawmakers to leverage reconciliation to dramatically impact the topline for military-related spending,” researchers say.
The reconciliation bill, which Trump signed into law on July 4, delivered $8 billion in new contracts for the drone industry and another $1.3 billion for technology to defend against drone attacks. That comes on top of the billions of dollars in allocations made through the traditional defense budget: Military contractors like Amazon, Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) stand to benefit from up to $5.6 billion more in spending on artificial intelligence and drone investments in the latest version of Congress’s record-breaking $914 billion defense budget.
Between 2020 and 2024, 54 percent of the Defense Department’s discretionary spending went toward private contractors, with $771 billion in taxpayer funds going to just five firms: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.
The weapons industry has ramped up its lobbying in recent years as firms advocate for increased “defense” spending. In 2023, arms makers spent $139 million lobbying the federal government, or roughly $381,000 a day; last year, the industry upped that spending to $157 million, employing nearly a thousand lobbyists.
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