Does US national security spending average $2 billion a day?
For fiscal 2020, ending Sept. 30, Congress approved a Department of Defense budget of $704.6 billion. Related national-security spending--such as intelligence-gathering--brought total funding to $738 billion, or just over $2 billion a day. Last year's budget was finalized in December as part of overall negotiations with the executive branch, nearly three months after the fiscal year was underway.
The White House is proposing to maintain a similar level in fiscal 2021 of $740.5 billion for national security, including $705.4 billion for DOD.
Political and expert opinion is almost always divided on how much defense spending is enough, a Brookings Institution overview notes. Spending today is relatively much smaller than during much of the 20th century, at about 3% of U.S. economic output, compared to levels as high as 8% during the 1960s.
