Pentagon provided $2.4tn to private arms firms to 'fund war and weapons', report finds

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Pentagon provided $2.4tn to private arms firms to ‘fund war and weapons’, report finds

Exclusive: Most of defense department’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 went to military contractors

Andrew Roth in Washington
Tue 8 Jul 2025 19.00 BST
Last modified on Tue 8 Jul 2025 20.11 BST

A new study of defense department spending previewed exclusively to the Guardian shows that most of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was described as a “continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing”.

The report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Costs of War project at Brown University said that the Trump administration’s new Pentagon budget will push annual US military spending past the $1tn mark.

That will deliver a projected windfall of more than half a trillion dollars that will be shared among top arms firms such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as well as a growing military tech sector with close allies in the administration such as JD Vance, the report said.

The report is compiled of statistics of Pentagon spending and contracts from 2020 to 2024, during which time the top five Pentagon contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman) received $771bn in contract awards. Overall, private firms received approximately 54% of the department’s discretionary spending of $4.4tn over that period.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/08/pentagon-military-spending

Alternate link: https://news.yahoo.com/news/pentagon-provided-2-4tn-private-180025065.html

[Irish_Dem]

1. But US is broke, cannot afford healthcare, education, science, etc.

We are becoming like North Korea.
People live in poverty while the military receives much of the country's wealth.

[Fiendish Thingy]

2. Well, Ukraine benefitted from some of that

Somebody has to build the guns, bullets, bombs, etc. since the US government doesn’t.

But yeah, that’s a shit-ton of money.