Department of Defense Budget

The Department of Defense, which prior to its renaming in 1947 was known as the Department of War, receives the single largest share of annual discretionary funding portion of the federal budget. This money pays soldiers and DoD civilian employees, buys weapons, and supports training and warfighting. DoD has largely escaped budget cuts in recent fiscal years, experiencing real growth while other agencies and programs have sustained critical cuts. Below are two charts that demonstrate, in some small measure, the size and impact of the budget of the Department of Defense.

The federal government’s debt now exceeds $14 trillion and this figure is growing as the government continues to fund a large portion of the annual budget by borrowing. This adds the cost of interest to the total size of each agency’s budget request. Due to the size of its budget, the Department of Defense is responsible for an estimated 39% of net interest paid on the national debt in 2011. This has varied historically from a high of 70% of interest in 1946 to a low of 10% in 1940. The federal government has spent an estimated $2.7 trillion on interest paid to finance national defense. Both increased federal borrowing and increased Department of Defense spending are associated with periods of war.

At current levels, one year’s appropriation for the Department of Defense (not including the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) would exceed total appropriations for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since its founding in 1938 through Fiscal Year 2010 (in actual amounts allocated at the time, or current dollars). 90% of the NIH budget funds research at NIH and research centers around the country, which seek to improve overall health and save lives.