Despite national debt concerns, Baumgartner backs Trump’s call for more military spending and cuts to welfare programs

WASHINGTON, D.C. – When lawmakers return to the Capitol from a two-week recess on Monday, one of their first orders of business will be supplementing the budget of the U.S. military, which has depleted its stockpiles of missiles and other materiel during five weeks of war with Iran.

In addition to the supplemental defense spending bill his administration is expected to request from Congress, President Donald Trump asked for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in military funding in his annual budget request on April 3, a roughly 44% increase over the current fiscal year. In an interview Wednesday, Rep. Michael Baumgartner said he supports additional defense spending despite his concerns about the $39 trillion national debt and federal deficits that routinely add trillions more each year.

“America is going to spend $7 trillion this year on the back of $5 trillion in revenue,” the Spokane Republican said. “One of the reasons I came to Congress is to try to leave a better America for the future.”

Baumgartner has cited that roughly $2 trillion federal deficit in calling for the United States’ NATO allies to shoulder a bigger share of the mutual defense burden – something Trump has successfully pushed them to do since his first term – but he said that does not mean Congress should reduce the U.S. military’s budget. While he noted that drones and other technologies present an opportunity to do more with less money, as Ukraine has demonstrated in its resistance to Russia’s invasion, the congressman said the United States should cut costs on social services, not national defense.

“I think the president is right to highlight that the world is a very dangerous place, and we’re a lot better off as Americans if we actually have the military equipped to deal with it,” Baumgartner said, adding that the United States shouldn’t follow “the European model” of investing in social welfare and what he called “environmental fads” at the expense of a strong military.

“The Constitution that we swear an oath to doesn’t say that it’s the job of Congress to provide massive social welfare programs, or all the other bazillion things members of Congress get asked to fund,” he said. “It does talk about the common defense of the country. And we have a militant Russia, a rising China, ongoing threats of radical Islam, who-knows-what’s going to come from the artificial intelligence race and super computers. We just have a huge, more complex global array of threats, and we do need to update our armed forces, and that’s going to be expensive.”

Trump set himself apart from his fellow Republican candidates during the 2016 campaign by pledging not to cut funding for Social Security or Medicare, the income and health care programs American seniors rely on. But in a video from a private lunch event on April 1 that the White House briefly posted online, apparently by mistake, the president said the federal government should not pay for those welfare programs.

“We’re fighting wars,” Trump said. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare – all these individual things.”

Baumgartner said he does not want to cut Medicare, but he did not rule out cuts to Medicaid, which pays for health care for low-income Americans, pregnant women and people with disabilities. He said the restrictions Republicans placed on eligibility for Medicaid and food stamps through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July are an example of the cost cutting they need to expand to address the nation’s ballooning debt.

Wary of the political fallout of cutting Medicaid, Republicans crafted that bill so the cuts will not take effect until the end of Trump’s term. That raises the possibility that Democrats will reverse them, eliminating the $1 trillion in savings the changes are projected to generate over a decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate committee responsible for government funding, has promised to “rip up President Trump’s budget” and has the power to shape federal spending through the annual appropriations process. Baumgartner noted that Congress in unlikely to approve exactly the budget Trump has requested, and he said the parties should work together to find ways to spend money more efficiently.

But Republicans have another opportunity to boost defense spending without Democrats being able to block it. Like they did for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, GOP leaders plan to use a process called budget reconciliation to enact their taxation and spending priorities.

“Broadly speaking, I think it is appropriate to rebalance federal spending and push some spending decisions back to the states on what they want to do on social welfare programs,” Baumgartner said. “At the federal government level, we have to bring the budget into balance. And the first job of the federal government has to be – in terms of how we spend money – to keep us safe.”

Baumgartner said balancing the federal budget and addressing the national debt will need to be done with the support of the American people, and that may require a future president campaigning on a platform of fiscal responsibility. Trump has repeatedly promised to balance the federal budget, but he has presided over trillions in additional debt in his first and second terms.

Only about a quarter of federal spending is “discretionary,” the portion that Congress reviews each year through the appropriations process, and about half of that amount is spent on defense. The remaining three quarters of “mandatory” spending is essentially on auto-pilot unless Congress acts to change it.

The president’s budget request typically outlines an administration’s priorities for both categories of spending along with proposals for increasing revenue, but the request released April 3 includes only discretionary spending, along with a request for Republicans to supplement mandatory spending through the budget reconciliation process. The request includes more than $600 billion in additional defense spending and only $73 billion in cuts to other spending, which would add more than $500 billion to the debt.

In the current fiscal year, according to federal spending data, defense accounts for about 22% of spending, Medicare roughly 18% and Social Security just over 16%, while Medicaid and other health care programs make up 14%. Any serious effort to reduce the deficit would need to address those programs, but doing so is seen as politically dangerous by both parties.

After the Trump administration proposed reforms in March to reduce overpayments to private companies through the Medicare Advantage program that are projected to cost taxpayers $1.3 trillion over the next decade, the administration reversed course this week and proposed increasing spending on the program. Social Security, which Congress created in 1935 to reduce poverty among seniors, now pays the wealthiest couples more than $100,000 a year. The Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that advocates for deficit reduction, estimates that simply capping those payments at $100,000 a year per couple, or $50,000 per retiree, could save taxpayers up to $190 billion over a decade.

Meanwhile, Congress has routinely increased defense spending in recent years even while the Pentagon rushes to spend that money on unnecessary expenses by the end of each fiscal year, based on “use it or lose it” funding rules.

An analysis by the government watchdog group Open the Books found that the Defense Department spent $93.4 billion in September, the last month of the fiscal year, including $6.9 million on lobster tail and $1.8 million on musical instruments, headlined by more than $98,000 for a grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home. The analysis found that since 2008, the Pentagon has splurged on furniture at the end of each fiscal year, spending an average of over $257 million in that category each September.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on April 10, 2026, to clarify that retired couples can receive more than $100,000 per year in Social Security payments, or over $50,000 per individual.