We Must Fix America's Priorities
This is what the President of the United States said a few days ago:
“It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.
You can’t do it on a federal level. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
He followed that up by releasing a budget request that seeks to raise military spending by around $500 billion in 2027, bringing it to a total of $1.5 trillion, while also adding more money for immigration detention on top of the previous large increases for ICE and CBP.
At the same time, the budget calls for major cuts to renewable energy programs, climate research, NASA, agriculture, housing, health programs, education research, civil rights enforcement in education, and housing assistance programs, including cutting a program that helps people in need pay for home heating. AmeriCorps would be eliminated. Rental assistance would be weakened and capped for many adults. Homelessness programs would be cut so deeply that as many as 170,000 people could be at risk of losing their homes.
Budgets are moral documents, and this one shows that the President’s priorities are all wrong. Near limitless spending on waging foreign wars while cutting programs that are needed to address the struggles of unaffordable housing, healthcare, and childcare.
Social Security exists because the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare of the nation. That understanding was once much clearer in American politics. Over time, it has been pushed aside in favor of a much narrower vision of government, one that treats support for the workers who grow our food, build our houses, and fix our cars as excess but rarely asks the same questions about ever-expanding military spending.
That shift has had consequences.
The minimum wage was left to decay into a poverty wage. Social Security was allowed to weaken, and its reserves to run dry. Healthcare funding has been cut so far that hospitals have shut down. The meager $6 a day for food assistance has faced cuts even as living costs soared. Meanwhile, there has been no serious movement to restrain the growth of defense spending. This year, military spending rose above $1 trillion. Now the president wants to pile another half trillion on top of that, while the Pentagon prepares to ask for an additional $200 billion to cover the costs of the new war in Iran.
Even more maddening is that many of the programs we’re told our nation can’t afford would save the country money.
Hospital administrative costs have exploded and, in 2023, were twice the cost of the care provided to patients. Administrative costs for health insurance almost doubled over the past decade, reaching $131 billion in 2024. A system built around universal coverage allows for lower overhead and stronger price negotiation. The result is healthcare that costs less, covers more people, improves outcomes, and reduces wait times. There is no practical reason to prevent this, but there are political ones.
Profit-making in healthcare depends on preserving the current system. Insurance companies have donated almost $500 million to political campaigns over the past five years, and the broader healthcare industry spent roughly $1 billion lobbying Congress in 2025 alone. Politicians are paid to not support the people.
We see similar issues in education.
One of the clearest ways to lower costs for families while improving long-term outcomes is universal Pre-K. It allows more parents to work. It reduces dependence on federal aid over time and improves children's life outcomes. All of which results in the program paying for itself over time.
The solutions to reduce hardship, expand opportunity, and lower long-term public costs are not mysteries. They have been known for decades. But billions of dollars are spent to block them, and that effort has been so effective that many Americans now accept as fact the idea that the federal government cannot do what it clearly can, and absolutely should.
What America could do for its citizens, the prosperity it could create, makes this military spending even harder to defend.
The proposed $500 billion increase in spending could fund:
Universal Pre-K for 3 and 4-year-olds
Universal low-cost childcare for 0-2 year olds
Federal paid parental leave program
Free school lunches and breakfasts for all
Free College, Trade Schools, and Apprenticeships
Altogether, those investments would total roughly $183 billion to $233 billion a year. That is less than half of the proposed increase to military spending. Even covering last year’s $160 billion Social Security Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance trust fund deficit would still keep the total below the increase in spending.
Money is not being withheld because the country cannot afford to improve people’s lives. It is being directed elsewhere, often wastefully.
The federal government can spend far better to support the country than it does today. It can invest in families, wages, housing, food, retirement security, and education. It can strengthen the floor beneath ordinary people instead of pouring ever more money into war.
There are larger reforms worth debating, including whether the many different support programs should be replaced with something simpler and more direct. There are also easier steps that should have happened long ago, such as raising the federal minimum wage over the next five years until it reaches a truly livable level.
But those conversations won’t happen if we keep pretending that caring for the general welfare of the nation is somehow outside the role of the federal government, when it is specifically defined in our Constitution in the same clause, even the same sentence, as providing for the common defense.
The country is not protected when families cannot afford childcare. It is not protected when people lose housing assistance, when hospitals shut down, when children go hungry, or when workers are paid wages that keep them in poverty. National security goes far beyond missiles, drones, and guns. True national security requires a thriving, prosperous public.
It is time to stop spending trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars and start investing in America’s workers and families. Most importantly, we need a Congress that understands this, and if they refuse to listen, that is what the midterms are for.