Trump’s Pentagon Budget is a human, economic, and environmental disaster
The new $1.5 trillion request implies 267 megatons of carbon emissions—and could fund massive social spending instead
By Patrick Bigger
On Friday, in the midst of the US and Israel’s illegal, ill-conceived war on Iran, the Administration made a staggering $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request. We have analyzed the climate implications of military budgets before, including the already-obscene $1 trillion budget passed last year. But this new proposal is so far out of historical norms and so environmentally catastrophic that it demands a fresh accounting.
Last year, we estimated that the FY2026 Pentagon budget would generate 178 megatons of carbon pollution (CO₂e). That estimate is based on the best available research on US military emissions intensity not just from the direct emissions of US military operations, but of its sprawling military-industrial complex; after all, more than 54% of Pentagon spending is sent to private defense contractors.
When we apply the same ratio of spending to emissions, the new $1.5 trillion request implies 267 megatons of carbon pollution.
That amount of pollution is roughly equal to the annual emissions of the Philippines, and just below those of Spain. If the US military were a country, emissions from this proposed budget would make it the 32nd largest emitter on earth.
This is not a marginal impact, particularly at a time when we absolutely must reduce carbon pollution by investing in transformative programs that actually make peoples’ lives better and communities safer as the climate crisis intensifies. The United States is already spending more than $1 trillion per year dealing with the impacts of the climate crisis, a figure that will only continue to grow the longer it takes to transition to a zero carbon economy.
The financial costs associated with 267 megatons of emissions are shocking on their own. Using a 2023 US EPA social cost of carbon suggests that Pentagon emissions will cause $71 billion in harm from climate-fueled disasters like heat deaths, crop failures, and wildfire loses; what’s worse, the majority of those losses will accrue in Global South countries, disproportionately harming communities that have contributed the least to climate change.
These numbers also demonstrate something important about the current war on Iran. By our calculations, building on analysis we released two weeks into the Iran war, the war has produced about 10 megatons of emissions so far. This is a serious and unacceptable amount of climate pollution in the context of a dwindling global carbon budget, on top of the hideous cost of human life and the COVID-scale economic ramifications that are beginning to ripple across the globe. These emissions figures are also instructive in light of the Pentagon’s gargantuan carbon bootprint: the everyday operations of the US war machine have by far the most serious climate impact because of the global network of more than 800 overseas bases, the resource-intensive manufacturing supply chains, and above all, the volume of jet fuel used in everyday operations.
The administration argues that this unprecedented budget is necessary for “security,” but the evidence points in the opposite direction. At the same time that it is dramatically expanding military spending, the administration has proposed cutting foreign affairs by roughly 30 percent, gutting diplomacy, global health, and humanitarian aid. Rather than investing in the tools that actually reduce the likelihood of war, the administration is currently waging a seemingly unwinnable war against a country that posed no imminent threat to the United States. As a result, prices are starting to spiral as energy markets have been destabilized, creating windfall profits for fossil fuel firms while the costs of everything from gas to groceries rise—with more pain virtually guaranteed as energy price inflation seeps into everything from utility bills to mortgage rates.
In addition to these economic effects that will hurt working class people already contending with a cost of living crisis the hardest, the economic tradeoffs of this additional spending on the military-industrial complex are stark. That money could be used to address the real causes of insecurity in the United States while reckoning with the climate crisis at scale. For example, $500 billion would cover more than 25 million people with Medicare for a full year; that’s almost the entire population of Texas. It could build more than two million new units of affordable housing, stabilizing rents and virtually eliminating homelessness across the country.
Or, $500 billion could effectively end the wildfire crisis in the US West; that much money could pay for the restoration of nearly 100 million acres of overgrown forest on public lands. When these forests go up in megafires, they cause billions of dollars in health impacts, destroy property, and release even more carbon into the atmosphere. Investing in forest restoration prevents all of those outcomes while rebuilding thriving rural economies and communities across the West. Finally, just the increase in Pentagon spending could pay for at least 500 gigawatts of utility-scale solar. That’s enough to power nearly 60% of all US homes. It would be one of the biggest decarbonization investments in world history and could substantially lower utility bills.
Finally there are the mounting economic tradeoffs represented by the ongoing attacks on Iran. We conservatively estimate that the United States has spent roughly 37 billion on the attacks as of April 6, 2026. That money could have funded
Pre-K for every four-year old in America
Green retrofits for nearly 2,000 public schools
More than double the cost of restoring the cuts to food benefits (SNAP) in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill
Or put differently: the first 38 days of the war could have paid nearly the entire US fair share to global climate adaptation finance—a share that it has never come close to contributing. Given the United States’s enormous historical responsibility for the climate crisis, this is an urgent priority.
In short, this preposterous budget request is not just a choice between “security” or “social spending.” More fundamentally, it represents a choice between a militarized fossil fuel empire or a liveable future with investments in the things that working class people and communities need not just to survive the climate crisis, but perhaps even thrive.