Winning! Rates are going UP!.. Oh that is losing....

Mortgage rates just hit 7.28%. But there are ways to get a lower rate

By Samantha Delouya

Mortgage rates keep going up.

The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 7.28% this week, up from 7.03% last week, according to Freddie Mac data released Thursday. Mortgage rates have risen for six straight weeks, and this week brought the biggest one-week jump in nearly four years. Rates are now at their highest level since November 2023.

Turmoil in the bond market is driving rates higher. The 10-year Treasury yield has risen in recent months as investors worry that the Iran war and increased government spending could further stoke inflation and push the Federal Reserve toward higher rates for longer.

If you’re currently in the market for a home, the good news is you may be facing less competition from rate-sensitive buyers who are stepping back. But if you need a mortgage, the bad news is you will likely pay more in monthly costs than you would have just a few months ago.

But even with borrowing costs high – and potentially headed higher – a sub-7% mortgage rate may still be within reach for some buyers. The trade-off could be a riskier loan or a much bigger upfront payment.

Here’s what to know:

Get creative with your mortgage

Most home buyers opt for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage because it typically offers lower monthly payments and predictable costs.

But it’s not the only option. Other types of mortgages may offer lower interest rates, potentially saving borrowers money over the life of the loan.

A 15-year mortgage typically has a lower interest rate than a 30-year mortgage, though monthly payments are significantly higher. Another option that is becoming increasingly popular lately: adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs).

As of the latest data last week, “ARM loans, with rates around 80 basis points lower than fixed rate loans, accounted for 10.3% of applications, the highest share since October 2025,” according to Joel Kan, deputy chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association.

But ARM loans, the mortgage products that helped fuel housing market risk in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, are riskier than fixed-rate loans. They typically offer a lower fixed rate for five, seven or 10 years before resetting with market rates. If rates are higher when the fixed period ends, borrowers can be hit with sharply higher monthly payments.

“It may work well for some borrowers who are expecting to move or refinance in four or five years,” said Jeremy Luke, a divisional director at Chase Home Lending. “It may not work for all.”

Another way to get a lower mortgage rate is to take over someone’s existing mortgage as an assumable loan.

Not all home loans can be passed to a home buyer, but most government-backed loans, such as those from the Federal Housing Administration, the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the US Department of Agriculture, are assumable.

However, the approval process for an assumable mortgage can take longer. And because the buyer takes over only the seller’s remaining loan balance, they may need to bring significantly more cash to the table to cover the difference between that balance and the home’s purchase price.

Buy down your rate

The rate an individual buyer gets depends on more than market conditions. Lenders also consider factors such as the borrower’s credit score, debt-to-income ratio and down payment, said Jeff DerGurahian, head economist at loanDepot.

After shopping around, if you are unsatisfied with the rates you’ve been offered, it’s often possible to pay more up front in exchange for a reduced interest rate.

Permanent buydowns lower your interest rate for the life of the loan, whereas temporary buydowns, which can be cheaper, lower your rate for only the first few years.

But it’s important not to overdo it, DerGurahian said.

“You don’t want to put so much money down that you can’t do what you need to do to live in your house and live day-to-day,” he said.

Get someone else to cover a buydown

Sometimes, the home’s seller or a builder can cover the cost of a rate buydown.

Builders are leaning more heavily on incentives to attract buyers to new construction, offering concessions such as mortgage rate buydowns and closing-cost credits. In September, 66% of builders reported using sales incentives, up from 63% in August and the highest share since December, according to the National Association of Home Builders’ sentiment survey.

A buyer should also understand the demand picture in their local market, said DerGurahian.

If it’s a buyer’s market, that means the supply of homes in that area exceeds demand, giving home buyers the upper hand. If a homeowner is motivated to sell, they may be willing to offer concessions to attract a buyer. If sellers have the upper hand in a local market, though, it’s less likely.

Take advantage of programs designed to help

Certain buyers may have access to federal programs that can help them secure more favorable mortgage rates, including VA loans for eligible veterans and USDA loans for buyers purchasing homes in qualifying rural areas.

There are also banks and credit unions that offer relationship pricing or preferential rates.

For example, Chase occasionally runs “rate sales” where home buyers (and homeowners looking to refinance) can lock in discounted rates, Luke said.

Some banks, including Chase, also offer a discounted rate if customers move eligible deposits and investments into that bank, Luke added.

Don’t forget to shop around

It pays to shop around. Experts generally recommend applying with at least three different mortgage lenders to make sure you’re getting a competitive rate. Compare the rates offered, closing costs and other fees to get a clearer picture of the total cost of each loan.

And you don’t necessarily have to worry about multiple credit checks dinging your score. To shop around for mortgages without hurting your credit, limit your search to a window of 14 to 45 days, according to Bankrate.

Needs to do more than step back, unless he is on a cliff...

Alito bows out of blockbuster Supreme Court climate case

The conservative justice had previously resisted calls from environmentalists to recuse himself.

By Lesley Clark and Alex Guillén

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is stepping back from a major climate argument just a week before the court is scheduled to take up the case.

Alito had faced calls to recuse himself from Suncor v. Boulder over his financial interests in energy companies. A Monday letter from Scott Harris, clerk of the court, informed the parties that Alito “has determined that he will not continue to participate in this case.” The notice did not further explain his decision to sit out arguments Oct. 5, the first day of the court’s new term.

In the case, Colorado localities are seeking damages under state tort laws related to the effects of climate change. The suit named Suncor and ExxonMobil.

While Alito does not hold stock in those companies, he is invested in several other fossil fuel companies, including oil giants ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66. They are named in many lawsuits similar to Colorado’s that have been filed around the country. The future of those cases will be affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Suncor.

A spokesperson for the court as recently as May had said that Alito wouldn’t recuse because he didn’t have a ”financial interest in any party” involved in Suncor and that he was advised by the court’s legal counsel that “his recusal is not required.”

Alito did recuse himself when the court turned away an appeal from the companies in the Colorado case in 2023. But that recusal came as the court on the same day rejected appeals in similar cases involving other companies, including ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66.

The court spokesperson said earlier this year that Alito had “inadvertently recused” himself in the earlier Colorado case “because it was considered at the same time as other cases where the justice did have a financial interest in the parties.”

Alito had resisted calls to step aside from the upcoming climate argument, even as watchdog groups note that the entire oil industry is likely to be affected by the decision. California-based Consumer Watchdog has noted that both ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 have warned shareholders multiple times over the past decade about the potential financial consequences of the litigation.

The group called Alito’s recusal the “right decision, and one he should have made from the start.”

“The public should not have to wonder whether a justice’s personal investments could benefit from a ruling that shields the fossil-fuel industry from liability,” said Organizing Director Alexandra Nagy.

Conservative groups have also called for Justice Elena Kagan to recuse herself as part of a broader effort to discredit a judicial educational manual. The court has not acknowledged those requests.

Alito is one of just two justices to hold investments in individual companies, including in fields other than energy. The other is Chief Justice John Roberts, who holds just a few stocks, none in the energy sector.

Barrage of lawsuits

Barrage of lawsuits targets Trump’s funding cancellation

Lawmakers are looking to the courts to help protect Congress’ funding power.

By Jennifer Scholtes, Cassandra Dumay and Kyle Cheney

Lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s move to cancel $810 million in congressionally approved spending are piling up in courtrooms throughout the country as states and groups that receive federal dollars fight to keep the cash flowing.

In the final hours before the fiscal year ended late Wednesday, a half-dozen states went to federal court to challenge Trump’s latest use of a controversial “pocket rescission.” A group that helps students from migrant families go to college also filed suit, trying to preserve about $25 million in education funding Trump is seeking to claw back.

At least one federal judge so far has been sympathetic to arguments that Trump’s move, which essentially runs out the clock on Congress’ right to evaluate and potentially reject funding clawbacks, could be illegal: U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb ruled late Wednesday to delay the expiration of $56 million for housing support services, temporarily blocking Trump from canceling the money.

The flurry of legal action comes as many lawmakers on Capitol Hill clamor for the courts to strike down Trump’s action as an illegal and unconstitutional encroachment on Congress’ power to dictate how federal cash is spent.

But the fresh lawsuits will not necessarily prompt a sweeping ruling from the Supreme Court, which allowed Trump to go ahead last year with withholding $4 billion he canceled through the same budget tactic. The high court argued in that brief unsigned order that the Trump administration had made a strong argument that outside groups may not have legal standing to sue under the decades-old impoundment law.

In the lawsuit Wednesday by six states, the suing parties argue that the president has not only flouted that 1970s law, but also the Constitution and the annual funding bills Congress has enacted over the last year.

The group suing over the cancellation of funding for educating students from migrant families laid out similar arguments, contending that the Trump administration has violated the First Amendment by discriminating based on “protected speech, expressive activities, and viewpoints that are irrelevant to funding or activities” the programs support.

Cobb’s decision, meanwhile, is only temporary. She explained in an emergency order Wednesday that she acted because the suing groups “would lose out on significant amounts of funding due to allegedly unconstitutional actions.”

Airing ‘propaganda’

Top Democratic appropriator wants White House to pay for airing ‘propaganda’

Sen. Patty Murray is proposing to dock the Office of Management and Budget for violations.

Jennifer Scholtes

A group of Senate Democrats are rolling out a bill Thursday to cut funding from the White House budget office any time a president uses taxpayer dollars to pay for anything considered political “propaganda.”

The legislation led by Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate’s top Democratic appropriator, is unlikely to clear Congress unless Democrats win control of the House and Senate in the midterms. But the language could eventually be included in annual government funding bills and serves in the meantime as a way for Democrats to press their GOP counterparts on President Donald Trump’s ongoing use of federal funding to air campaign-style ads commending the president and his offensive against Iran.

“Congress cannot sit on its hands,” Murray said in a statement, noting that lawmakers in both parties have said in recent days that they oppose the taxpayer-funded ads the Trump administration is defending as “public service announcements.”

The bill would dock the budget of the Office of Management and Budget by $20 million every time an administration violates existing law barring the use of federal funds for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” The head of the Government Accountability Office would be charged with determining if such a violation has occurred.

Major loss

Judge rules Trump can’t fire court-appointed prosecutors

The ruling is a major loss for Trump’s effort to install loyalists in key positions.

By Erica Orden

A federal judge on Thursday ruled that President Donald Trump doesn’t have the power to fire court-appointed U.S. attorneys, rejecting a core tenet of the Trump administration’s approach to top prosecutorial jobs.

“The president cannot unilaterally fire a United States attorney appointed by the district court,” U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian said in a ruling from the bench. Doing so, Bastian said, “would upend the framework created by the Constitution and the statutes, which together balance the president’s right to appoint and the Senate’s right to confirm.”

The Justice Department said it will ask an appeals court to temporarily block Bastian’s decision while it appeals the ruling.

The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by Roger Rogoff, whom Trump purportedly fired from the job of U.S. attorney for the Seattle-area Western District of Washington immediately after the district’s federal judges appointed him to the role in July.

In his ruling, Bastian, an Obama appointee, determined that Rogoff is the U.S. attorney and has legally occupied that role since he took the oath of office on July 15. The judge also stripped power from Charles Neil Floyd, whom the Trump administration had temporarily installed in Rogoff’s place, determining that the administration had “improperly granted” authority to Floyd.

The Trump administration has repeatedly sought to circumvent the Senate confirmation process to appoint loyalists in top positions. In cases when district judges have exercised their authority to select someone else as the U.S. attorney, Trump has fired that person.

In his ruling, Bastian not only restored Rogoff to the job, but also took steps designed to thwart any attempts by the Trump administration to undermine his authority or transfer it to someone else. Bastian ordered that the executive office of the president, Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department are barred from “any purported firing” or removal of Rogoff from his post, interference with his service in the role and from treating anyone other than Rogoff as the U.S. attorney.

Lie Lie Lie............

Korea to Trump: We aren’t funding your Alaska pipeline, yet

President Donald Trump touted Korean funding for a long-stalled pipeline project in Alaska. The Korean government said they haven’t promised the money.

By Daniel Desrochers

The Korean government denied Thursday morning that it has finalized an investment for a long-stalled Alaskan natural gas project, less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump tried to help boost the state’s Republican senator with a flashy Oval Office funding announcement.

“This is a great senator, who is totally responsible for this pipeline,” Trump said of Sen. Dan Sullivan, who stood beside him Wednesday at the White House. “This is a man that works with me, shoulder to shoulder.”

There is just one problem: Korea says the pipeline investment is still under review.

Korean President Lee Jae Myung and several other members of his government said Thursday that their investment in the Alaska pipeline remains conditional.

“The Alaska LNG project will proceed to working level under the preconditions that 1) its commercial viability is confirmed and 2) it complies with the legal procedures of the Republic of Korea,” Lee posted on X Thursday morning, according to a translation.

The government also issued a release saying “the two countries have agreed to begin reviewing the project,” and will proceed based on “commercial reasonableness requirements.”

The project involves a large-scale natural gas pipeline to transport energy from northern Alaska to the southern part of the state and would create a terminal that would help facilitate exports to Asian countries like South Korea and Japan. Presidents have been promising to tap into those isolated natural gas reserves in northern Alaska since the Carter administration, but several efforts have failed to attract investment due to concerns about cost and future returns.

Trump on Wednesday claimed South Korea had committed $54 billion in funding for the project as part of a $350 billion U.S. investment pledge Seoul made last year in a deal to lower threatened U.S. tariffs. He also said that Korea would spend around $120 billion on eight nuclear plants across four states and around $20 billion on a natural gas power plant in Texas.

It was the latest in a series of events the White House has held in recent days to tout massive foreign investment for projects in midterm battleground states — even if the details remain fuzzy.

Earlier this week, the administration highlighted a new steel plant in Iowa, but some industry experts are skeptical that the plant will be built given the troubled financial past of Mesabi Metallics, the company linked to it, and the fact that its projections are based on the current high U.S. steel prices.

Trump made it clear Wednesday that the LNG investment announcement had to do with Sullivan’s election chances. He denounced the fact that another candidate named Dan Sullivan — who is running as an independent — was allowed on Alaska’s ballot in November and told the reporters gathered that the incumbent Sullivan had his ear.

“I have to tell you this because he has an election,” Trump said at one point.

Trump and Sullivan emphasized Wednesday that the pipeline project would be transformative for Alaskans, and a developer claimed the project would be done in three years. No members of the Korean government spoke during the White House announcement.

If they had, they might have pointed out that the government in Seoul had already allocated its annual $20 billion U.S. investment commitment for the natural gas power plant in Texas — another state where Republicans are in a closely contested Senate race.

Arp 78

Peculiar spiral galaxy Arp 78 is found within the boundaries of the head strong constellation Aries. Some 100 million light-years beyond the stars and nebulae of our Milky Way galaxy, the island universe is an enormous 200,000 light-years across. Also known as NGC 772, it sports a prominent, outer spiral arm in this detailed cosmic portrait. Tracking along sweeping dust lanes and lined with young blue star clusters, Arp 78's overdeveloped spiral arm is pumped-up by galactic-scale gravitational tides. Interactions with its brightest companion galaxy, the more compact NGC 770 seen directly below the larger spiral, are likely responsible. Embedded in faint star streams revealed in the deep telescopic exposure, NGC 770's fuzzy, elliptical appearance contrasts nicely with spiky foreground Milky Way stars.

How fucking crazy are they??

What to Know About Hegseth’s New Office of Religious Affairs

“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God.”

Kiera Butler

On Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the creation of a new entity within the Pentagon: the Office of Religious Affairs. The office, Hegseth promised the assembled troops in Quantico, Virginia, would “report straight to the top. No staff filters, no bureaucratic dilution, a direct line to the secretary.” Chaplains would “finally have an advocate at the highest levels.” What’s more, “policy and resources will serve the mission, not smother the mission.”  

A hallmark of Hegseth’s tenure at the Department of War has been his muscular Christian religiosity. Earlier this year, he spearheaded an initiative to bring prayer services to the Pentagon. Shortly after the start of the Iran War, during one such event in March, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Hegseth’s own faith is relevant here: He is a member of a conservative denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals Churches (CREC) that explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. As I reported:

At a February Pentagon prayer service, the featured speaker was Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC. Wilson, who has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed,” has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.

The new Office of Religious Affairs isn’t explicitly Christian; a memo (PDF) published yesterday specifies that “Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to compel religious participation or to diminish the free exercise rights of any Service member, civilian employee, or family member of any faith or no faith.” Yet earlier this year, the Pentagon released a new list of 31 religions officially recognized by the US Department of War, drawn from the 200 that had previously been accepted. On the new list, 22 of the 31 groups were Christian. Atheists, pagans, and humanists, all on the original list, had vanished. 

Details about what exactly the Office of Religious Affairs will do have not yet been released, but yesterday’s memo offers a few clues. In addition to moving chaplains directly under the control of the new office and overseeing the groups that decide who can become a chaplain, the office also will “sponsor and oversee research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness, and spiritual resilience.” It doesn’t define those terms, but Hegseth’s track record speaks volumes. As I reported a few months back:

In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth writes that the Geneva Conventions are unfair because the United States and Europe are the only ones that follow them. Instead, “America should fight by its own rules,” he declares. The nation’s soldiers should be “the most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.”

Hegseth also bemoans a defense force infected, he writes, with the “fucking scary” disease of progressivism, which “will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!” He warns, “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy asses.” In July, Hegseth announced an initiative to screen troops for low testosterone and offer hormone replacement therapy to those found deficient.

Hegseth has also long been preoccupied by what he sees as a “spiritual battle” between secular and Christian culture:

On an episode of the podcast CrossPolitic [produced by Doug Wilson’s Canon Press] that aired shortly before Hegseth became Secretary of War, he railed against Godless America, lamenting that liberals “used patriotism to untether us from timeless truth, from the Bible.” He also praised classical Christian schools for providing “a comprehensive worldview that prepares them for the battle to come, because we’re in a spiritual battle, and otherwise we’d be sending our kids in as fodder.”

Among the funding priorities listed in the Department of War memo about the new office are “faith-based homeschool support for military families,” faith-based suicide-reduction initiatives, and “contracted services from faith-based non-Federal entities.”

As I wrote, Hegseth’s own book echoes those themes:

Hegseth’s 2022 co-authored tome, Battle for the American Mind, is essentially a book-length extension of that metaphor. “Charging the ‘commanding heights’—the leftists’ educational Death Star—with Nerf guns will not suffice,” he writes. “We don’t want martyrs, we want victors.” Classical Christian education is our only hope to “give our kids and grandkids at least a fighting chance to save America and Christendom,” Hegseth concludes. He exhorts parents to “join the insurgency!” Children educated in this way, he believes, might stand a chance at defending their nation—because the wokes have failed miserably.

Notably, Wilson’s Canon Press publishes popular homeschool curricula. “Education is warfare,” the website says. “Canon curriculum is designed to help you raise faithful, dangerous Christian kids, one subject at a time.”

The new memo promises that within 90 days, the office will deliver “a comprehensive baseline report of all unfunded and underfunded religious affairs requirements.” In the meantime, Hegseth has lofty ambitions. “We’re placing spiritual health at the same level as physical health,” he said in his speech. “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God.”

Will make your mind bleed........

Think Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Pentagon Request Is Outrageous? This’ll Blow Your Mind.

We already spend at least that much on the US military each year, and maybe a lot more.

David Vine

On April 3, four weeks after Donald Trump claimed the Iran War would be over in four to five weeks, and with his approval ratings in reputable polls dipping below 40 percent, the president made a wildly audacious ask: Congress, he said, should approve a Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion.

Such a number was unheard of. Congress gave the military an official budget of nearly $1.1 trillion for the 2025 fiscal year—more than the next five runners up (China, Russia, Germany, India, and the UK) combined. Now, counting supplemental funding for the War in Iran, which is entering its eighth month, Trump wants US taxpayers to shell out just under $1.6 trillion ($1,570,000,000,000) to a “Department of War” that’s so un-auditable it probably doesn’t know where it left the car keys.

That’s an increase of almost 50 percent for things that go boom.

As much as we Americans may value our military readiness, 65 percent of US adults polled by the Washington Post in late April opposed Trump’s unprecedented funding request, and two-thirds disapproved of his “little excursion” in Iran. (They still do.) The disapproval numbers would be higher still, no doubt, if those people were aware of a dirty little secret: We’re already spending more—way more—than what the Pentagon reports, and most media outlets dutifully parrot.

A recent report I helped coauthor for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) estimates that, properly accounted for, US military expenditures last year were at least $1.5 trillion, and possibly a lot more. If Congress grants Trump’s requests, we’ll be spending $2 trillion to $3 trillion on the military and its wars.

This isn’t just about Trump, but rather the DC establishment. For decades, the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon have been obfuscating military spending by means of arcane bureaucratic practices and budgeting tricks. And yet most journalists and experts quote the official numbers, which are profoundly incomplete.

Consider, for example, that the Treasury Department covers about $100 billion of the annual cost of supporting retired military personnel. And that the $7.3 billion the State Department shelled out for “global health programs” in fiscal 2025, according to data from USASpending.gov, is actually controlled by the Pentagon. (The money, as I point out in my book Base Nation, is used for military intelligence gathering and gaining strategic access to locations around the world.) Sometimes it’s smaller sums, like the $385 million the Justice Department shelled out that fiscal year to settle old Vietnam War claims and compensate people harmed by radiation from nuclear weapons testing.

If the routine concealment of hundreds of billions in military spending doesn’t feel scandalous to you, imagine the uproar were the Wall Street Journal to suddenly reveal that federal officials were secretly spending almost a half-trillion beyond what Congress budgeted for Medicaid, affordable housing, education, childcare, climate programs, or food assistance. This fuzzy accounting “is not a new phenomenon. It has been a bipartisan effort spanning years,” Air Force veteran and former military budget analyst Christian Sorensen told me in an email. “When the sheer size of the figures revealed in [the] accounting sinks into public consciousness, the body politic will be even more furious.”

“The true scale of the military budget is much larger than reported,” concurs Heidi Peltier, an economist and budget expert with Brown University’s Costs of War Project. This overlooked spending raises the total, she says, by “50 percent to 130 percent higher than is usually reported, a figure likely to stun most Americans.” 

Quantifying miliary expenditures should be a relatively easy task for journalists and researchers. It is not. “The non-obvious costs” of what budget expert Stephen Semler, a fellow at the progressive Center for International Policy, calls “status quo” military spending are “so vast that it’s difficult to take [their] measure,” he told me.

The POGO report details how military expenditures are spread across a host of federal departments beyond the Pentagon. And how, taken together, those amounts may exceed the total of what those agencies receive for nonmilitary purposes. This is not the result of some single diabolical plan, but rather the product of obscure bureaucratic processes wherein the Pentagon, over time, has taken control of money Congress appropriates to other agencies, as a Senate Budget Committee staffer told me on condition of anonymity. While lawmakers’ actions and motivations in some cases may demand further investigation, their collective complacency has allowed the military to claim a significantly larger share of the federal budget than the public is aware of.

Using five methodologies and data from three government sources, we calculated how much money the government really spent on the military. For fiscal 2025, depending on the methodology used and how one defines military spending, that number ranged from $1.5 trillion to $2.3 trillion. For example, most of the $33.5 billion in nuclear weapons spending tracked by USASpending.gov was tucked into the Department of Energy budget. And most of the $393.3 billion cost of military pensions, veterans’ benefits, and related retirement expenditures were found on the ledger of the Department of Veterans Affairs, thus relieving the Pentagon of a substantial long-term expense. The USASpending.gov data allowed us to identify billions more in the budgets of at least 15 other agencies, expenses that don’t make it into commonly reported military spending totals.

“No agency on Earth could fail eight audits and still get a $1.5 trillion check, except the Pentagon,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee from San Diego, which has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of military personnel, said in a statement. And without the accounting to prove the money is properly spent, she added, “we shouldn’t keep footing a bill that gets bigger every year.”

Even our estimates are likely undercounts, thanks to spotty federal budget transparency, classified funding, and Pentagon accounting failures. Indeed, the Department of Defense remains the only federal agency, as Jacobs noted, that has never passed a financial audit.

We taxpayers don’t get to choose everything our money is used for, and that’s part of the grand bargain. Progressives would rather not see their tax dollars supporting Trump’s deportation machine. And plenty of conservatives would repeal the Affordable Care Act tomorrow if they could. But even as we bicker over priorities, whatever our politics, an accurate accounting of where our money goes is indispensable to an honest debate.

That’s where Congress comes in. Lawmakers could stop putting military spending in budgets beyond that of the “Department of War.” They could also, for example, order the Congressional Research Service to compile an annual “total military” roundup that details everything in one place. Until that time, journalists and analysts might want to include a large asterisk whenever they cite the Pentagon’s official numbers.

The concealment of our true military budget, wittingly or unwittingly—as many members of Congress may not even realize this subterfuge is happening—shows just how out of control Pentagon spending has become, and how wildly disproportionate it is to the military threats we face. Because the reality is, we’re not merely spending more on our military than the five runners-up, but likely more than every other nation on Earth combined.

Why does this matter? Several reasons. Trump and his “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth have purged military leaders who put the Constitution first and stacked the Pentagon with loyalists. The president has dispatched National Guard troops to US cities and hasn’t ruled out ordering them to the polls during the elections, which would be in clear defiance of the Constitution. For people around the world, US military spending is a life and death matter, given the debacle in Iran—which Trump recently threatened to annihilate—and the president’s periodic threats to wage war on Cuba, Greenland, and Colombia, despite campaign promises that he would be the president who didn’t get the United States embroiled in foreign conflicts.

Put bluntly, a larger military budget means more war. It also means a bigger deficit, which pressures Congress to further slash funding for health care, Social Security, climate resilience, food safety, and all manner of domestic programs people depend upon. If Congress gave Trump what he asked for, our military spending would gobble up some 75 percent of discretionary federal funds.

In this light, his budget request should be treated as the sick joke that it is—an opportunity for the people and their representatives to insist on a different path.

Democrats and even some Republicans who claim to be concerned about our $40 trillion-plus national debt, have so far resisted Trump’s request for a Pentagon bump. In early September, the president signed a bill that extends current military funding levels into December. Both chambers of Congress are now in recess until after the midterms, so the matter may not even be resolved until after new members are seated in January 2027.

In the meantime, “federal lawmakers would be wise to read the tea leaves, analyze the numbers, and pursue a sound, moral budget before it’s too late,” Sorensen said.

That would mean reining in runaway military spending before laying a finger on the domestic programs that already help accomplish what should be the US military’s most fundamental purpose: keeping Americans alive and well.

Federal investigation into Trump PSA’s

Raskin leads calls for federal investigation into Trump PSA’s

The Maryland Democrat could lead the House Judiciary Committee in the next Congress.

Chris Marquette

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee is demanding federal inquiries into the amount of taxpayer money used to furnish a television ad blitz propping up President Donald Trump ahead of the midterms.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is poised to lead the panel if Democrats win the majority in November, joined California Democratic Rep. George Whitesides in sending a letter to the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Special Counsel. It asks the GAO to investigate the “source, accounts, and total amount of taxpayer funds used by the Executive Office of the President to produce and distribute this advertisement across major television markets and official White House social media channels.”

The lawmakers also asked the Office of Special Counsel to investigate whether the ads “paid for by millions of dollars of taxpayer funds, constitute a violation of the Hatch Act, and determine who should be held accountable.”

The ads, which so far have run during NFL games and flagship Sunday news shows, depict Trump in a powerful and effective light, with glimpses of him posing for the camera, denigrating the free press and denouncing communism. Each includes the phrase, “paid for by the U.S. government.”

“These ads constitute an illegal use of taxpayer funds, perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that they are virtually identical to the ones Donald Trump used during his 2024 presidential campaign, and in fact use the same footage and the same inept ideological messaging,” Raskin and Whitesides contend.

Other congressional Democrats have also reached out to the administration in recent days to express outrage and ask basic questions about how the ads were derived and funded.

Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Chris Murphy of Connecticut — the top Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee and the appropriations subcommittee on Homeland Security, respectively — have written to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin regarding reports that the agency has redirected $20 million in funding originally intended for Customs and Border Protection to “bankroll the obscene political ads.”

A White House spokesperson called the TV spots “public service announcements” and said they are designed to remind “Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad. The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country.”

A spokesperson for DHS said the agency “follows all applicable rules for contracting decisions and keeps all decision makers informed” and that “all contracting decisions are made in accordance with applicable law.”

The Office of the Special Counsel confirmed it received the letter and declined comment.

A spokesperson for GAO did not respond to a request for comment.