Trump’s proposed budget hides $1 trillion in military spending from the public by spreading it across disparate government agencies.

No one can tell you exactly what’s in the bloated Pentagon budget and what it costs. After all, the Defense Department has never passed an audit. Still, we know it’s larded up with terrible, lethal, wasteful expenditures. There are $2.2 million Tomahawk missiles — the type that killed more than 150 Iranian civilians, most of them school children. And the Zumwalt class of naval destroyers that were billed as a $1.5 billion per ship bargain, but now cost taxpayers $10 billion each. And there are the untold sums spent by self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s department to line the pockets of online influencers. Yep, that’s a thing. American taxpayers are on the hook for all of it.

The Pentagon secretly hired conservative military veterans with large online followings to work in undefined roles earlier this year. When called on his participation in the program, for example, Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel with more than 620,000 followers on X, admitted he “came back as a civilian for a short time to help improve our work colleges.” This may mean rooting out supposed woke-ness at the military war colleges, but when TomDispatch asked the Pentagon for clarification, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez failed to comment.

What we do know, thanks to recent reporting by Wired, is that Schlichter is a conservative gadfly with extremist views. He has, for instance, suggested that people who don’t have children, don’t own property, and haven’t served in the military shouldn’t be allowed to vote. “Penalize barren, non-familial lifestyles through taxes and disqualification from political participation,” wrote Schlichter. “Establish property and military service qualifications for voting.” He has also lauded murderous dictators from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet to Spain’s Francisco Franco; referred to immigrants as “perverted Third World peasants”; and branded “liberal women” as “self-righteous crones” who “are a pestilence, a plague upon Western society … whose antics, if unchecked, will inevitably lead to the fall of civilization.”

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