2 days ago
Trump's Pentagon Parade Will Cost Lives and Livelihoods
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President Donald Trump wants to spend tens of millions on a military parade that happens to be on his birthday. At the same time, he's pushing cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, child labor enforcement, and more.
This country needs many things—like cheaper groceries and housing and better jobs, health care, and schools. Instead of taking care of any of that, this parade will cost taxpayers an estimated $45 million. The street repairs post-parade alone are projected to cost about $16 million, since ordinary city streets aren't designed to handle heavy military traffic.
Trump's military parade will not accomplish a single thing. It's a microcosm of this administration's bigger budget priorities.
A U.S. soldier crawls out from under a M1 Abrams tank taking part in the Army's 250th birthday celebration parade during a preview at West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., on June 11, 2025.
A U.S. soldier crawls out from under a M1 Abrams tank taking part in the Army's 250th birthday celebration parade during a preview at West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., on June 11, 2025.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
President Trump and his followers in Congress are in the process of gutting Medicaid and food stamps to slash taxes for the wealthy, triple the budget for separating immigrant families, and pass the first-ever $1 trillion Pentagon budget. The president's budget proposal also promises cuts to a host of other programs, from public schools to medical research.
And despite the president's falling out with Elon Musk, the president still stands by Musk's brainchild DOGE, which has cut billions of dollars in government services—often illegally.
Many of those programs improve or even save lives for a lot less than the cost of the parade. In a new fact sheet, my colleagues and I at the National Priorities Project of the Institute for Policy Studies laid out just a few of them.
For instance, Trump and DOGE seem to have it out for HIV programs. DOGE cut off a grant to Florida State University to prevent HIV among U.S. adolescents—and another grant to develop an HIV vaccine in South Africa. Either could be reinstated for less than the cost of Trump's single-day parade.
Farmers and rural communities were targets too. Among other things, DOGE cut a program to help farmers in the Chickasaw nation and Oklahoma develop climate-smart farming practices—a necessity in a world where climate change is an undeniable reality. And among many other states, Wyoming lost a grant to help expand broadband internet access.
Those grants cost less than a few hours' worth of creeping tanks and soldiers in period costume.
The cuts to programs for kids are especially brutal. President Trump gave the OK to cut a program that provided lawyers to kids who experienced abuse and neglect, another program to reduce maternal and child deaths from malaria and other causes in Malawi, and another still to reduce the use of child labor worldwide.
Each of those programs cost less than the estimate for street repairs from Trump's parade.
And for about the cost of the parade, the Department of Education's civil rights division could hear and investigate reports of discrimination in schools for an entire year. When the Trump administration essentially stopped their work earlier this year, the office had 10,000 outstanding complaints, most of them from students with disabilities.
We don't need a parade. But kids who experience discrimination, abuse, or forced labor need someone to stand up for them. Farmers need new approaches to adapt to our changing weather. Rural communities need access to the same internet that more urban places take for granted. And children and adults at risk of HIV, malaria, and other diseases deserve medical treatment and prevention to save their lives.
If we could do all that for the cost of a parade, just imagine what we could do instead with $1 trillion for the Pentagon. For that amount, we could totally fill the national nursing shortage, help uninsured people with opioid use disorder get treatment, insure all uninsured kids in this country, expand affordable housing, create 350,000 clean energy jobs, send every household a $1,000 check, and much, much more.
We don't need more money for weapons and war, and we certainly don't need to line the pockets of CEOs at the for-profit contractors that do dirty work for the Pentagon and ICE. What we need instead is help to survive and thrive—and many of those programs cost less than a single day of Pentagon pageantry.
Lindsay Koshgarian, a federal budgeting expert, directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
