On Friday, the Trump administration unveiled a budget blueprint centered on a vast escalation of military spending. In its Fiscal Year 2027 budget request, the White House is asking Congress to approve roughly $1.5 trillion for “defense”—that is, for military aggression—which would be the highest level of military spending in modern history. This is a staggering 40 percent increase over already record Pentagon spending.
This is a budget for World War III. It comes as Trump carries out—and escalates—his pledge to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” i.e., to destroy the infrastructure of civilized life in a country of more than 90 million people. The FY2027 request calls for $1.1 trillion in base spending, plus hundreds of billions more in mandatory funding for munitions and “defense industrial base” expansion.
The document demands $65.8 billion for shipbuilding to procure 18 battle force ships and 16 non-battle force ships, and announces “President Trump’s Golden Fleet,” including funding for a “Trump-class battleship” and “next generation frigates,” while maintaining or increasing procurement of major platforms. It pushes “Golden Dome” missile defense, including space-based sensors and interceptors, while simultaneously accelerating “drone dominance,” “unmanned and counter-unmanned systems” and “historic investments” in artificial intelligence.
At the center is preparation for confrontations far beyond Iran: the tightening encirclement of China and the expansion of nuclear enterprise and nuclear command, control and communications. The budget boasts that it is moving “aggressively” toward the F-47 sixth-generation fighter to “project power anywhere on the globe,” and it frames the entire buildup as a conscious shift away from “legacy” systems to next-generation capabilities designed to win “21st Century wars.”
As Trump vows “Stone Age” destruction, this $1.5 trillion request is the financial mechanism for building the most technically advanced machinery to carry out a project of historical regression.
How is this to be paid for? Through a massive assault on the social rights of the working class.
The budget proposal itself includes $73 billion in cuts across domestic agencies, targeting housing, education and climate-related programs. It advances cuts that weaken even the minimal regulatory restraints on corporate exploitation: for example, reduced funding for the already barely funded Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) amidst an ongoing wave of workplace deaths; cuts to Housing and Urban Development; and reductions in Health and Human Services, including programs that help working class families pay for heating and basic necessities.
But these cuts cannot finance the scope of the military escalation Trump is demanding. A war budget of $1.5 trillion, on top of an already massive deficit and debt burden—the product of endless war and handouts to the banks—requires far more than trimming discretionary line items. It points directly to the core social programs—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security—because these are the only budget categories large enough to loot.
This is the meaning of Trump’s leaked remarks at a closed Easter lunch this past week, where he stated baldly that social programs must be sacrificed because “we’re fighting wars.” Trump demanded: “Don’t send any money for day care. … We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” and went further: “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare. … We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”
Here, as they say, Trump let the cat out of the bag. For more than three decades, under both Democrats and Republicans, the ruling class has carried out a systematic assault on the social reforms of the 20th century, which were wrested from it through bitter class struggle and conceded, in part, out of fear of social revolution. From Clinton’s declaration that he would “end welfare as we know it,” to Obama’s pro-corporate “healthcare reform” that entrenched the profiteering of insurers, to the relentless degradation of public education, the direction has been the same.
But the “big money” lies in the main social programs that constitute the minimal guarantees of modern life for tens of millions: Social Security, established in the Great Depression and relied on by more than 70 million people, and Medicare and Medicaid, established in the 1960s—Medicare covering roughly 68 million, and Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program together covering more than 75 million, including about 36 million children.
In ruling circles it has long been understood that these programs must be targeted to finance militarism and enrich the financial oligarchy. The Wall Street Journal has stated the underlying class logic bluntly: the “real choice” is between “guns” and “runaway entitlements”—that is, between imperialist war and the social rights of the working class.
The implementation of this program is not possible except through the erection of a ruthless police state dictatorship. This is the essential class content of the paramilitary deployment of immigration police, the ICE murder of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the cultivation of fascistic violence, and the criminalization of dissent. As the WSWS wrote yesterday, “A government that brutalizes populations abroad will employ the same methods at home. Methods developed in imperialist war find their counterpart in domestic life.” War and dictatorship are two fronts of the same class war.
As in waging war, so in domestic policy Trump acts as the spokesman of the oligarchy. He expresses in the most ruthless and unvarnished form a class policy that is supported by both Democrats and Republicans.
The Democrats respond to Trump’s budget proposals with the usual insincere and hypocritical statements, but they support the class essence of the program. They have voted for the massive military and intelligence budgets that fund the war machine Trump now expands without restraint. Even as the administration has built a domestic apparatus of intimidation and terror, Senate Democrats voted unanimously on March 27 for a Department of Homeland Security funding measure that abandoned even minimal restraints on ICE and the Border Patrol.
The Democrats support the assault on social programs because they defend the capitalist system that demands it. One must reserve particular contempt for the so-called “left wing” of the Democratic Party. It should be recalled that New York City Mayor and Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani’s much-touted pact with Trump was based on a supposed agreement with Trump to support Mamdani’s “affordability agenda.” As it turns out, this “agenda” involves the destruction of social programs to wage war and erect a dictatorship.
The implementation of the policy of the oligarchy will generate, indeed already is generating, explosive resistance. This was expressed in the March 28 “No Kings” demonstrations, which drew millions into the streets in the broadest display yet of popular opposition to war, dictatorship and social reaction.
It is also emerging in the developing strike movement and the growing wave of workplace struggles. The war itself is accelerating social opposition. It is intensifying inflationary pressures, diverting resources on a colossal scale and deepening economic dislocation. Masses of workers in the United States, moreover, are horrified by the violence that is being inflicted upon the people of Iran.
Trump is laying bare, in the most brutal and unmistakable form, what Marxists have long explained: The capitalist state is an instrument of class rule. A rapacious and criminal oligarchy is using the power of the state to wage war abroad, destroy social programs at home and establish a police state.
The decisive question is how opposition will be organized. The Socialist Equality Party insists that that must proceed through the methods of class struggle, mobilizing the independent social power of the working class. The defense of social programs and every basic democratic right cannot be separated from the struggle against imperialist war.
The task is to develop a conscious political movement of the working class, independent of both capitalist parties and the union apparatus, and united internationally. That means confronting the source of power: the oligarchs and the gigantic corporations they control. This requires a socialist program—the expropriation of the oligarchs and the gigantic corporations they control and the transfer of society’s decisive economic resources to public ownership under democratic control.