Trump donor’s $130M to pay troops during shutdown. It would cover seven hours each.

WASHINGTON – The $130 million that a wealthy donor gave to President Donald Trump to pay troops’ salaries amid the government shutdown is enough to cover them for seven hours of work.

The hours are ticking down to Oct. 31, when members of the military are expecting their next paycheck. The government has yet to announce how it will fund their salaries.

Axios reported Oct. 29 that the Pentagon had scraped together around $5.3 billion to pay troops from other Defense Department funds.

Vice President JD Vance said on Oct. 28 that “we believe” some troops, but not all, would be paid.

“Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to pay everybody, because we’ve been handed a very bad hand by the Democrats,” he said.

Federal coffers have been frozen for nearly a month, since Democrats on Oct. 1 refused to vote in favor of Trump’s spending priorities, sending the government into a shutdown.

More than 700,000 government workers are furloughed and barred from working. Employees deemed essential for national security, including Defense Department employees who are not in the military, are required to continue working without pay.

The Defense Department did not share details about how it would move funds to pay troops and referred USA TODAY to the Office of Management and Budget.

“President Trump is continuing to make good on his promise to take care of the troops despite the fact Democrats have shut down the government and are fine with our bravest men and women getting no pay,” it said in a statement.

A $130 million donation

Trump told reporters on Oct. 23 that “a friend of mine” had offered to cover “any shortfall you have with the military.”

“Today, he sent us a check for $130 million,” Trump added.

The donor was later revealed by the New York Times to be Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire who gave at least $150 million to Trump’s presidential campaign, according to public records.

Trump donor’s gift amounts to $100 for each servicemember

Those funds would be a tiny fraction of a week’s pay for each recipient.

During the last completed pay period, around $6.5 billion covered the cost of paying active duty troops, according to Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Relative to that amount, Mellon’s gift would have covered payroll for less than seven hours. Evenly distributed to the nearly 1.3 million active-duty members of the military, it would amount to around $100 each.

The Pentagon requested $194.7 billion to pay troops for the entirety of 2026, which breaks down to about $8 billion per bimonthly paycheck.

Servicemembers’ last paycheck came through on Oct. 15 after Trump ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to move $8 billion of military funding to pay troops. The Pentagon pulled the money from its research and development funds.

Around $1.5 billion of that money is left over, by Harrison’s calculations.

Now that the precedent has been set, the Pentagon should be able to move other untapped funds to make payroll, he said. “They have more than enough money to keep doing that for months.”

During the last government shutdown, which began in late 2018, Congress passed a bill to get troops the money they were due. Lawmakers voted down a similar measure on Oct. 23.

Skipping the appropriations process

Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell said the donation was accepted under the department’s “general gift acceptance authority.”

Experts say that’s not how it works – and that such a donation would be the first of its kind.

Donations to the government are accepted into the Treasury Department – which holds the government’s cash – and then disbursed based on congressional appropriations – rules set by Congress about how they can be distributed – just like other federal funds.

“Any money donated to the federal government goes into the Treasury. That doesn’t mean that an agency has the authority to take it out,” said Philip Candreva, a professor of national security policy and budgeting at Duke University.

“If there’s not an appropriation, you can’t pull that out of the Treasury.”

Normally, there would be consequences for such a move. Candreva said the department’s comptroller could issue a report on a violation of spending rules.

But, like other precedent-breaking moves by the Trump administration, using this money would have little punitive impact on a president or agency head like Hegseth.