U.S. Congress Demands Trump Spend Even More on the Military

2 July 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Though the U.S. Defense Department and the Homeland Security Department are the only two federal Departments that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (federal budget) increases — all others get decreased budgets — the U.S. Congress is now trying to force President Trump to add yet more to the Defense Department’s budget.

On July 2nd, Politico and Yahoo News headlined “Republicans tear into Pentagon’s Ukraine weapons freeze” and opened

Republican lawmakers are slamming the Trump administration’s decision to halt some U.S. missile and munitions shipments to Ukraine, warning it risks emboldening Russia at a pivotal point in the war.

Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, said he would be “aggressively looking into this matter” following the White House’s acknowledgment that the Pentagon froze deliveries of critical air defense weapons due to concerns over shrinking U.S. stockpiles.

“We must build up our own defense industrial base here in the U.S. while simultaneously providing the needed assistance to our allies who are defending their freedom from a brutal invading dictator,” the Pennsylvania representative said in a post on X. “To not do both is unacceptable.”

Fitzpatrick later requested an emergency briefing from the White House and Pentagon.

Lawmakers of varying political stripes called the holdup of weapons approved during the Biden administration a breach of Trump’s renewed commitment to Kyiv at last week’s NATO summit, where the president floated selling Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine. POLITICO first reported the news on Tuesday, and since then, Kyiv has summoned a U.S. diplomat to explain the hold.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said he is probing “very intensely” whether the Pentagon’s freeze is a breach of Ukraine aid legislation that Congress passed in 2024. He also argued the pause is coming “at the wrong time,” weakening Trump’s efforts to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a peace deal with Ukraine.

“If you want to get him to the negotiating table in good faith, you have to put leverage and pressure on him, and that would be Lindsey Graham's economic sanctions and the flow of weapons,” McCaul said. “If you take the flow of weapons out, yeah, then you're not, you don't have the leverage over Putin to negotiate.”

Democrats — who during Trump’s first term pressed for his impeachment over holding up money to arm Ukraine to secure information on the dealings of his main Democratic rival, Joe Biden, and his family — assailed the aid holdup.

But some top lawmakers weren’t ready to pin the blame on Trump himself. Rather, they singled out senior Pentagon officials who have been skeptics of further aid to Ukraine.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, a longtime proponent of shifting U.S. military resources away from Ukraine in order to beef up Taiwan’s defenses.

She argued the pause undermines Trump’s commitments at NATO and urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is simultaneously serving as White House national security adviser, to enforce a strategy.

Hidden from the public, behind that lone phrase “due to concerns over shrinking U.S. stockpiles” — which I boldfaced — was the fact that there is so much corruption in U.S. military spending, so that American-made weaponry and supplies are vastly overpriced, and that the most profitable sector of the U.S. stock market is the “Defense/Aerospace/High-Tech” sector, whose main and sometimes ONLY markets are the U.S. Government and its colonies (‘allies’) such as America’s NATO anti-Russian military alliance (huge buyers of U.S. weapons), which has now committed to meet Trump’s demand to increase each nation’s NATO spending (currently set at 2% of each nation’s budget) to 5% of each nation’s budget. (And NATO constantly lies to say it’s “not a threat to Russia.”)

Though the Defense Department is one of the only two Departments that’s getting a budget-increase from Trump, it is also the ONLY federal Department that has never been audited. (They need to hide the corruption.)

In other words: Trump’s team have decided that they don’t want the U.S. Government’s budget-deficits to soar even higher than they would in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” but Congress is now demanding that he do so, in order for the U.S. to conquer Russia, China, Iran, and maybe also Venezuela, North Korea, and maybe even other nations, so as to continue being the world’s leading nation (something that greatly increases the clout of American billionaires).

Anyone who thinks that ONLY Trump is the problem, needs to think deeper.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.