Emajeblahova, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Over the past decade, the United States has entered a sustained phase of military expansion accompanied by widening geopolitical commitments and renewed great-power competition. While this trajectory is routinely justified in the language of national security, it exposes a deeper structural reality in American public finance: the systematic privileging of hard power and external commitments over long-term domestic investment. Nowhere is this imbalance more visible than in the divergence between rapidly expanding Pentagon expenditures, persistent foreign military aid—particularly to Israel—and the comparatively constrained growth of federal research funding through institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
In 2016, U.S. defense spending stood at approximately $624 billion. By 2025, it had risen to roughly $962 billion, with projections for 2026 exceeding $1 trillion. This represents an increase of more than 70 percent in nominal terms over a single decade. Even as defense spending has modestly declined as a share of total federal expenditures due to broader fiscal expansion, its absolute scale continues to grow at a pace unmatched by any other discretionary category. The United States remains in a structural position of military dominance, spending more than the next several countries combined—yet this dominance has not translated into restraint. Instead, it has normalized perpetual expansion.
Recent geopolitical developments have intensified this trajectory. The ongoing conflict involving Iran illustrates how quickly military engagements escalate into open-ended fiscal commitments with weak democratic consent and limited international legitimacy. Direct costs have already reached tens of billions of dollars, with early estimates ranging from $25 billion to over $50 billion. The war is deeply unpopular with the American public and has not been supported by a broad international coalition, yet it continues to impose substantial financial and strategic costs on the United States. Critics argue that the conflict does not clearly advance core U.S. national interests and instead reflects the strategic priorities of Israel more than those of the American public. In effect, the United States is absorbing the economic and political burden of a war whose objectives and benefits are not primarily its own.
But focusing on initial expenditures obscures the true fiscal architecture of modern warfare. Historical precedent shows that long-term obligations—including veterans’ care, equipment replenishment cycles, debt servicing, and reconstruction costs—often multiply total war costs several times over. Under such conditions, the full burden of sustained conflict can plausibly approach or exceed $1 trillion. With operational burn rates nearing $1 billion per day during peak activity and repeated emergency appropriations already underway, these are not marginal expenditures but structural commitments that accumulate over decades.
Alongside direct military spending, U.S. foreign aid policy—particularly toward Israel—reflects a parallel but equally entrenched allocation priority. Since 1948, the United States has provided over $300 billion (inflation-adjusted) in combined economic and military assistance to Israel. Under the 2019–2028 Memorandum of Understanding, the United States committed $38 billion over ten years—approximately $3.8 billion annually—locking in a long-term funding trajectory that persists across administrations and shifting geopolitical conditions. While frequently justified through strategic alignment and regional stability narratives, this arrangement also reflects a deeply embedded policy consensus that has proven remarkably resistant to reassessment, even amid growing domestic fiscal strain.
From a critical standpoint, the significance of this commitment lies not in its absolute size relative to the federal budget, but in what it reveals about how spending priorities are constructed, justified, and sustained over time. Americans are entitled to ask why such allocations persist with limited public debate or meaningful fiscal reassessment.
Israel is not a low-income or aid-dependent state; it is a high-income, technologically advanced economy with strong domestic institutions and comprehensive public services, including universal healthcare coverage and extensive social protections. By contrast, the United States—the primary financier of this relationship—does not guarantee universal healthcare to its own citizens, despite spending more per capita on healthcare than most advanced economies and achieving comparatively uneven outcomes.
The persistence of this funding reflects a durable alignment of strategic doctrine, institutional inertia, and domestic political incentives that collectively insulate it from the level of fiscal scrutiny applied to comparable domestic programs. In effect, it functions as a structurally protected category of expenditure—one that persists not because it is economically unavoidable, but because it is politically entrenched.
This becomes more politically consequential when juxtaposed with domestic constraints. Public resources allocated abroad necessarily exist in tension with domestic investment priorities. The persistence of substantial aid flows to a wealthy, self-sufficient partner underscores a broader structural orientation in U.S. fiscal policy: a consistent preference for sustaining external security architectures over addressing internal capacity gaps in areas such as healthcare, infrastructure, and scientific research. The result is a foreign assistance system that is more politically structured than economically rational.
However, critics argue that these external commitments must ultimately be evaluated through the lens of opportunity cost. Federal resources are finite, and allocation decisions necessarily encode judgments about national priorities. Every marginal dollar directed toward military operations or foreign assistance is a dollar unavailable for domestic investment in scientific research, public health infrastructure, and innovation systems that generate compounding long-term returns.
This trade-off is most clearly visible in the trajectory of biomedical research funding. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the principal federal engine of scientific and medical innovation—has seen its budget grow from approximately $32–34 billion in 2016 to roughly $48–49 billion by 2025. While this represents meaningful nominal expansion, it has been outpaced by defense spending growth and eroded in real terms by sustained increases in the cost of conducting biomedical research.
The consequences are visible in grant-level outcomes. The NIH-wide success rate for R01-equivalent awards—long considered the backbone of investigator-driven science—has declined from roughly 20–22 percent in earlier decades to approximately 13–15 percent in recent fiscal years (2024–2025 ranges across institutes). This aggregate figure, however, conceals more severe constraints within leading institutes.
Nowhere is this more pronounced than the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the largest NIH institute and a central node in U.S. biomedical research. The NCI operates under a percentile-based payline system that determines funding eligibility. In recent cycles, that payline has tightened to approximately the 8th–10th percentile range for R01-equivalent awards, meaning that only the top decile of peer-reviewed proposals is routinely funded. In practice, discretionary funding adjustments and competing programmatic priorities can reduce effective success rates further, pushing some applicant pools toward or below 10 percent. Forward-looking budget constraints for FY2025–2026 have raised concerns that paylines may compress further toward the mid–single digits in certain categories, producing conditions increasingly described by many researchers as a “lottery-like” environment.
This tightening is not solely the product of flat budgets. It is also driven by structural accumulation within the NIH funding system itself. A growing proportion of annual appropriations is now locked into multi-year continuing grants, reducing the share of funds available for new investigators. Combined with sustained growth in applications—now exceeding 40,000 R01-equivalent submissions annually—this has created a persistent structural imbalance between demand for scientific funding and the system’s capacity to absorb it.
The consequences extend far beyond academic competition. Public investment in biomedical research is among the highest-return categories of federal spending. Peer-reviewed studies consistently estimate returns of approximately $2 to $3 in economic activity for every $1 invested through the NIH, driven by downstream innovation, pharmaceutical development, and regional research ecosystems. NIH-funded science functions not merely as knowledge production but as a foundational input into entire high-value sectors of the U.S. economy.
The development of mRNA vaccine technology illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. Far from being a sudden product of private-sector innovation, it emerged from decades of publicly funded research in molecular biology, immunology, and RNA delivery systems. This trajectory underscores a structural reality often obscured in budget debates: NIH funding is not a discretionary subsidy for academia, but a long-horizon investment in national innovation capacity.
Within this context, the tightening of research funding is not an administrative inefficiency but a signal of shifting federal priorities. It reflects a system in which large-scale commitments to defense and external strategic partnerships expand more rapidly and more reliably than the domestic scientific infrastructure that historically underpins long-run economic and technological leadership.
The contrast between military and research spending is therefore not merely a question of fiscal balance, but of temporal orientation. Military expenditures are largely reactive, shaped by immediate threats and geopolitical contingencies. Research funding is inherently forward-looking, producing benefits that accumulate over decades rather than electoral cycles. The current trajectory suggests a growing imbalance between these two logics of state investment.
The existing allocation structure increasingly reflects short-term strategic imperatives at the expense of long-term national capacity-building. Even marginal reallocations—measured in low single-digit percentages of the defense budget—could substantially expand research funding, stabilize grant success rates, and reinforce the scientific workforce pipeline.
In conclusion, the past decade reveals not simply a rise in military expenditure, but a deeper divergence in how the United States defines and deploys power. One form of power is immediate, kinetic, and externally projected. The other is cumulative, internal, and generational. Increasingly, American fiscal priorities favor the former over the latter, shaping a national strategy oriented toward presence and projection rather than capacity and renewal. The imbalance between them is not only fiscal—it is strategic.
The central question is not whether the United States will remain powerful, but whether it is still investing in the kind of power that endures beyond crisis, conflict, and political cycles.