What America's Budget Says About Its Priorities: Military Spending vs. Homelessness
America faces real threats. It needs a capable military. Those two statements can be true at the same time as a third: the United States spends far too much money through a defense system that repeatedly rewards delay, cost growth, weak accounting, and spending for the sake of preserving future budgets.
This matters because budgets are not abstract. Every billion dollars committed to one purpose is a billion dollars unavailable for another purpose unless the government taxes more, borrows more, or cuts somewhere else. Homelessness is a useful comparison not because a fighter jet and an apartment are interchangeable, but because the scale exposes what Washington is capable of funding when it decides something is urgent.
The 2023 comparison needed correcting
The original version of this article used a homelessness figure of 582,462 for 2023. That number belonged to an earlier national count. HUD's January 2023 Point-in-Time count found roughly 653,100 people experiencing homelessness. The earlier article also compared a defense authorization figure with homelessness-program funding. This update uses FY2026 appropriations on both sides wherever possible so the comparison is cleaner. The latest national homelessness count available now is higher still.
HUD reported 745,652 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2025, including 266,320 people living unsheltered. That total was down about 3% from 2024 but remained 27% above 2013. A Point-in-Time count is a one-night snapshot, not the number of people who experience homelessness at any point during a year, so it should be treated as an indicator rather than a complete census.
The federal housing side also deserves a cleaner comparison. Congress approved approximately $4.417 billion for Homeless Assistance Grants in FY2026, along with $1.25 billion for the HOME Investment Partnerships Program and $3.3 billion for Community Development Block Grants. Those programs do different jobs, but together they illustrate how relatively small many major domestic accounts are beside defense spending.
Who actually threatens the United States?
There are real threats. The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment from the U.S. intelligence community identifies China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and other actors as strategic or military challenges. It warns that several states are developing missile systems capable of threatening the homeland and that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea pose significant cyber threats to American networks and critical infrastructure.
That is a strong argument for deterrence, intelligence, cybersecurity, nuclear command and control, missile defense, resilient infrastructure, capable naval and air forces, and alliances. It is not automatically an argument for every existing program, every procurement decision, or every dollar Congress can fit inside a defense bill.
The more useful budget question is therefore not, “Are there threats?” Of course there are. It is: what capabilities actually reduce those threats, and how much should they cost?
A military that spends $10 billion slowly developing something obsolete is not more secure than a military that delivers the needed capability for $5 billion and uses the remaining money elsewhere. Efficiency is part of readiness.
The waste is not hypothetical
The best argument for reducing defense spending is not a meme about a mythical $600 toilet seat. It is the Pentagon's own oversight record.
In June 2026, the Government Accountability Office described weapon-system acquisition waste as a systemic loss of billions of dollars and years of time. GAO said the acquisition process can push officials to award large development contracts and obligate money quickly so funding is not “lost” to another program. In that environment, success can become measured by money spent rather than capability delivered.
That description will sound familiar to people who have worked inside large military organizations. At the unit level, the incentives can appear in mundane ways. During Army training, unused ammunition could become an administrative burden to turn back in, creating a practical incentive to expend remaining rounds rather than return them. An anecdote from one unit cannot establish a department-wide rule, but it illustrates the same broader incentive GAO describes: bureaucracies can make using the money or material easier than preserving it.
After more than 13 years of development and more than $7 billion spent, the Space Force terminated the Next Generation Operational Control System in April 2026 because confidence was too low that it could deliver enough capability in time.
GAO says the Army's estimated $1.8 billion augmented-reality headset program had not delivered operational capability after three acquisition efforts. Nearly 10,000 early units fell short of soldiers' needs and were headed for storage or testing rather than field use.
The Navy spent about $3.7 billion modernizing seven Ticonderoga-class cruisers. GAO concluded $1.84 billion was wasted beginning modernization on four ships that were later divested without deploying or producing operational value.
The Navy exercised options valued above $3.4 billion for six Constellation-class frigates before completing basic and functional design. Work on four of the six was later terminated.
GAO reported that the Sentinel ICBM program's estimated acquisition cost exceeded $129 billion, nearly $35 billion above its initial estimate. Cost growth is not automatically recoverable “waste,” but growth at this scale is a major opportunity cost.
GAO says the original F-35 development program finished more than a decade late and $250 billion above its original plan. GAO also found delivery incentives structured so contractors could still earn some fees when aircraft arrived up to 60 days late.
DOD reported about $10.8 billion in confirmed fraud from FY2017 through FY2024. GAO stresses that confirmed cases represent only a small fraction of the department's potential fraud exposure.
The Defense Department Inspector General found DOD's FY2024 improper-payment estimate unreliable for the 14th consecutive year and found the department noncompliant with federal payment-integrity requirements for the fourth straight year.
So how much could realistically be redirected?
No credible auditor can currently tell us, “The Pentagon wastes exactly $X billion every year.” That is part of the problem. DOD's financial-management and improper-payment weaknesses make a precise annual waste number difficult to establish.
A better way to think about the opportunity is to ask what very small efficiency improvements would mean against the FY2026 defense appropriation. This does not assume that the selected percentage is currently wasted. It is a scenario tool: if that share could be eliminated through better procurement, contract management, fraud prevention, inventory controls, program cancellation or administrative reform, what would the money look like beside domestic programs?
What if defense became just a little more efficient?
At 1%, the result is about $8.385 billion—roughly 1.9 times the entire Homeless Assistance Grants account, 6.7 times HOME, or 2.5 times the Community Development Block Grant formula program.
At 2%, the result is $16.77 billion. That exceeds the combined FY2026 funding of Homeless Assistance Grants, HOME and CDBG by roughly $7.8 billion.
At 5%, the result approaches $41.93 billion. A five-percent reduction in unnecessary cost would still leave more than 95% of the defense appropriation in place. The political question is whether it is plausible that a department with the acquisition, fraud and accounting record described above could become five percent cheaper without making the country five percent less safe.
This is the kind of efficiency campaign DOGE should have been built around
There is nothing inherently wrong with creating an aggressive government-efficiency effort. Large institutions deserve scrutiny, especially when taxpayers are funding them. The problem is that “savings” must be real, auditable and measured against outcomes—not merely announced.
GAO reviewed the Department of Government Efficiency's public “Wall of Receipts” in 2026 and found that some savings estimates were incorrect or unsupported. One especially relevant example involved a Defense Health Agency IT contract serving more than 700 military treatment facilities. DOGE reported $1.7 billion in savings, but GAO found the contract was not terminated, reduced in scope, reduced in value or reduced in funding. In that case, the claimed savings did not occur.
That is almost the inverse of the reform the Pentagon needs. The strongest efficiency program would measure whether a capability is necessary, whether it works, whether it was delivered on time, whether the contract price is reasonable, and whether the organization can verify where the money went.
GAO has already identified the targets: acquisition systems that “fail slow,” contracts committed before designs are mature, financial systems that cannot reliably measure improper payments, fraud exposure, and incentives to obligate money before a budget disappears. Those are structural savings opportunities. They are less theatrical than deleting a line item from a website, but they are much more likely to produce durable results.
Cut this first
Failed acquisition paths, duplicate work, poorly structured incentives, preventable cost overruns, fraud, unsupported payments, premature contracts, avoidable administrative overhead, and programs that cannot demonstrate useful capability.
Protect this
Service-member pay, healthcare, military family support, safe housing, training that actually improves readiness, maintenance needed for safety, mental-health care, transition assistance, and capabilities tied to credible threats.
Homelessness is not solved by writing one large check
Cutting Pentagon waste does not automatically produce housing. Congress would still have to appropriate the savings intelligently, states and cities would still have to build or preserve housing, and local systems would still have to connect people to the right services.
Homelessness has multiple pathways: unaffordable rents, extremely low incomes, disability, domestic violence, job loss, health crises, behavioral-health conditions, substance-use disorders, family breakdown, reentry from institutions and simple shortages of housing that people at the bottom of the income distribution can afford. A policy that assumes every person became homeless for the same reason will fail.
That is why “Housing First” should not be confused with “housing only.” The strongest evidence for Housing First is on its literal first objective: getting people into stable housing and keeping them housed. Systematic reviews have found large improvements in housing stability compared with treatment-first or usual-care approaches. Effects on health and substance use are more mixed, which is precisely why supportive services still matter.
Does Housing First ignore addiction or mental illness?
It should not. The model removes sobriety or treatment completion as a precondition for receiving permanent housing, then pairs housing with voluntary or tailored services. VA's HUD-VASH program, for example, combines rental assistance with case management and can connect veterans with healthcare, employment help, substance-use treatment and other support.
The reasonable criticism is not that people should be left unhoused until they become “housing ready.” It is that programs need enough behavioral-health, medical and case-management capacity after housing is secured. Stable housing is a platform for treatment; it is not a substitute for treatment.
But homelessness rose nationally during the Housing First era. Doesn't that prove it failed?
Current HUD leadership makes that argument, noting that national homelessness rose substantially between 2013 and 2025 while federal homelessness spending also increased. That trend deserves attention, but it cannot by itself identify the cause. National homelessness counts reflect housing costs and supply, migration, disasters, local implementation, shelter capacity, prevention policy, income, disability, behavioral health, and many other factors in addition to the design of federal grants.
Program-level research asks a narrower question: when comparable people receive Housing First or permanent supportive housing, are they more likely to become and remain housed? On that outcome, the evidence is considerably stronger. The national trend and the intervention evidence therefore answer different questions.
Veteran homelessness shows that sustained intervention can work
Veteran homelessness is one of the strongest reasons not to accept “homelessness is too complicated to solve” as the end of the discussion.
The decline cannot be credited to one program alone, but the federal response has combined targeted housing vouchers, VA case management, outreach, healthcare, prevention programs and local coordination. VA describes Housing First as a core approach within HUD-VASH: move a veteran toward permanent housing without making sobriety or treatment completion a prerequisite, then provide support around the housing.
This does not prove the identical model will produce an identical national decline for every population. Veterans have a dedicated federal healthcare system and benefit infrastructure that the general population does not. But it does prove something important: when government treats a specific homelessness population as a sustained priority, measures outcomes and funds both housing and support, dramatic reductions are possible.
See VA's 2025 veteran homelessness data → · Explore A Wandering Mind's veteran resources →
The strongest defense-spending argument still deserves an answer
Supporters of a very large military budget can make a serious case. The United States has treaty allies, global shipping interests, overseas citizens and forces, nuclear deterrence requirements, space assets, cyber infrastructure and an enormous economy tied to international stability. A conventional war in Europe or the Pacific would be catastrophically expensive. Deterrence can be cheaper than fighting the war it prevents.
That argument is strongest when it is attached to capabilities rather than totals. If a submarine, cyber unit, satellite network, air-defense system or logistics capability materially reduces the chance of war, its cost may be justified even when the number is large.
But “the world is dangerous” cannot become a blank check. The intelligence community itself says the relationships among China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are limited and primarily bilateral, warning that describing them as a single aligned bloc overstates the depth of their cooperation. China is a formidable strategic competitor, but the 2026 assessment also says Chinese leaders do not currently plan an invasion of Taiwan in 2027 and do not have a fixed unification timeline.
Threats should shape spending. Spending should not be used to manufacture a feeling of safety.
Foreign military aid is related—but not the same budget
Arguments about Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and other partners often get mixed into arguments about the Pentagon's core budget. Some foreign assistance ultimately purchases U.S.-made equipment or replenishes American stocks; some supports allies directly; some is humanitarian or economic rather than military. It should be scrutinized, but it should not be casually added to or subtracted from the $838.5 billion figure as if every category is interchangeable.
The relevant principle is the same: define the objective, measure whether the spending advances it, and stop treating the size of an appropriation as proof of seriousness.
The real argument is about opportunity cost
A $7 billion software program that is eventually terminated is not just a defense-management problem. Seven billion dollars is larger than the annual federal HOME program several times over. A $1.84 billion modernization effort that GAO explicitly says produced no operational value is enough money to matter in housing, infrastructure, mental-health capacity, schools, disaster preparedness or debt reduction.
That does not mean every failed defense dollar should automatically become a homelessness dollar. Domestic programs can waste money too. A serious reform agenda should apply the same standard everywhere: does the spending work?
But scale changes the stakes. When an institution receives hundreds of billions of dollars per year, tiny percentage improvements produce amounts that would be considered transformational in most domestic policy debates.
This is why the familiar response—“we cannot afford it”—often rings hollow. Affordability objections are not distributed evenly across the federal budget. Congress routinely finds room for enormous defense commitments while comparatively small domestic proposals are forced to prove, down to the last dollar, that the country can bear the expense.
The answer should not be to stop scrutinizing domestic programs. It should be to scrutinize defense spending with the same intensity.
A better set of priorities
A credible rebalancing would not begin with an arbitrary order to cut every military account by the same percentage. That is how governments cut muscle with fat.
It would begin by protecting people and mission-critical capability, then attacking the systems that create preventable cost:
Defense reform
Require mature designs before major production commitments. Tie contractor incentives to actual delivery and performance. Build stronger fraud analytics. Fix inventory and payment controls. Cancel programs earlier when they cannot demonstrate value. Reward units for returning unused resources rather than punishing them with future budget reductions.
Domestic reinvestment
Use a defined share of verified savings for housing supply, homelessness prevention, permanent supportive housing, behavioral healthcare, community infrastructure and programs with measurable outcomes. Reinvesting verified savings is different from simply increasing spending without reform.
This approach does not require believing that every defense program is wasteful. It requires believing something much less radical: the Pentagon should have to demonstrate value for money just like every other institution.
The conclusion has changed since 2023
The original version of this article ended cautiously: defense and homelessness are complex, the comparison is imperfect, and the country needs a multidimensional response. Those statements remain true. The evidence available now supports a stronger conclusion.
The U.S. military budget is too high—not because the United States faces no threats, and not because national defense is unimportant, but because the system repeatedly accepts costs and failures that would be intolerable if the money were scarce.
China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, cyber actors and terrorist organizations deserve serious attention. So do the hundreds of thousands of people who sleep in shelters, cars, encampments and streets inside the country those forces exist to defend.
A strong country should be capable of both defending itself and housing more of its people. If Washington wants to begin with fiscal discipline, the Pentagon is not exempt from that discipline simply because its mission is important. Its mission is exactly why waste should be less acceptable there.
Frequently asked questions
Does the United States spend $838.5 billion directly on the Pentagon in FY2026?
The FY2026 Defense Appropriations bill provides a base discretionary total of about $838.7 billion, with $838.5 billion categorized as defense. This is a useful measure of annual defense appropriations, but it should not be confused with every dollar the federal government spends on national security. Other accounts, including some military construction, nuclear-security activities, veterans programs and supplemental legislation, are handled separately.
Could $4.4 billion end homelessness?
No credible analysis supports treating $4.4 billion as a magic national price tag. Homeless Assistance Grants are one part of a wider housing system, and the cost of housing varies enormously by market. The comparison is about federal budget scale, not a claim that moving one account into another would instantly eliminate homelessness.
Is military cost growth the same thing as waste?
No. Inflation, changed requirements, engineering discoveries and legitimate capability improvements can increase costs. This article labels explicit GAO waste findings as waste and labels broader cost growth as cost growth. The F-35 and Sentinel figures show the scale of acquisition underperformance and opportunity cost; they are not presented as dollar-for-dollar recoverable cash.
Would cutting defense spending make the United States less safe?
Some cuts could. Eliminating needed readiness, maintenance, intelligence, cyber defense or deterrence capability simply to hit a target would be reckless. Eliminating fraud, failed programs, premature contracts, poor incentives and unnecessary administrative cost should have the opposite effect: more useful capability per dollar.
Does Housing First require ignoring treatment?
No. Housing First removes treatment or sobriety as a condition that must be completed before permanent housing. Strong implementations pair housing with case management and access to health, mental-health, employment and substance-use services. Evidence is strongest for improved housing stability; other outcomes are more mixed and reinforce the need for individualized support.
Sources & further reading
- U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations — FY2026 Defense bill summary.
- U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations — FY2026 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development appropriations.
- HUD — 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report release.
- Department of Veterans Affairs — 2025 veteran Point-in-Time count.
- VA Research — homelessness, HUD-VASH and Housing First research overview.
- GAO-26-109135 — Weapon Systems Acquisition: Beyond Business as Usual—Using Leading Practices to Curb Waste and Save Billions.
- GAO-25-108500 — DOD Fraud Risk Management.
- Department of Defense Inspector General — FY2024 Payment Integrity audit.
- Department of Defense Inspector General — Semiannual Report to Congress, Oct. 2024–Mar. 2025.
- GAO-26-108615 — DOGE Wall of Receipts: transparency and savings methodology.
- Office of the Director of National Intelligence — 2026 Annual Threat Assessment.
- Systematic review — Permanent Supportive Housing with Housing First and housing stability.
- Systematic review — Housing First effects on health and well-being.
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