On Defense Spending, a New York Times Double Standard

The rule of byline inflation holds that the reliability of any news content is inversely proportional to the number of journalists credited with producing it. So it is with a front-page New York Times news article headlined "For Military, Trump Seeks $1.5 Trillion."

The article carries the names of an astonishing nine Times journalists. There’s a byline by Tony Romm, and "contributed reporting" credit from another eight individuals: Brad Plumer, Scott Dance, Maxine Joselow, Andrew Duehren, John Ismay, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Lisa Friedman, and Michael C. Bender.

The Times article begins, "With the United States at war with Iran and embroiled in conflicts around the world, the White House asked Congress on Friday to approve about $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year. If enacted, that amount would set military spending at its highest level in modern history."

"The highest level in modern history" language is dramatic. It’s also unusual. When the New York Times writes about Democrat-proposed welfare spending or proposed tax increases, it never, or hardly ever, uses nominal current dollars to claim the "highest level in modern history."

For example, a March 2023 Times news article about President Biden’s budget proposal began, "President Biden on Thursday proposed a $6.8 trillion budget," and continued, "The budget contains some $5 trillion in proposed tax increases." The Times did not describe either the proposed spending level or the proposed tax increase as the biggest in modern history.

A March 2024 Times news article about President Biden’s budget proposal similarly began, "President Biden proposed a $7.3 trillion budget on Monday." It went on, "The budget proposes about $5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and the wealthy over a decade." In that article, too, the Times did not describe either the proposed spending level or the proposed tax increase as the biggest in modern history.

Because we have a fiat currency with the Federal Reserve targeting 2 percent inflation, and because the incentives of Congress generally tilt toward spending more, not less, spending in Washington ratchets up from year to year. This is such a sure thing that a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, Alan Cole, won $128,000 betting on a prediction market that federal spending would go up, according to a front-page report in the Wall Street Journal that observed Cole "just needed federal spending to go up, as it almost always does." This is especially so if you are counting in nominal current dollars rather than by some constant dollar or inflation-adjusted measure.

If the Times editors and reporters can’t grasp the concept, imagine a headline saying "New York Times Reporter Pay Hits Highest Level in Modern History." It may be accurate in some technical sense. The paper is currently offering $113,270 - $125,000 for a "fitness reporter" to "capture the latest in fitness culture" and "produce outstanding stories about fitness." But such a headline doesn’t tell the full story of what Times reporter pay means relative to how much apartments cost in New York City, or relative to how much lawyers or bankers or high-tech workers or television news anchors make.

Because the nominal, current-dollar figures are not particularly useful, people who care about defense spending or hope to increase it frequently look at it as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. That has its own issues—it doesn’t necessarily cost more to defend a country simply because its GDP has increased—but it’s another way to look at things.

The Times gestures in this direction lower down in the news article: "The roughly $1.5 trillion sought for the Pentagon next fiscal year would amount to about 4.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its economic output, according to Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution. By that measure, it would be the largest year-over-year increase for defense since the Korean War, her analysis showed, after adjusting for inflation."

This is confusing to readers because the first sentence talks about levels of nominal spending and of defense spending as a percent of GDP, but the second sentence talks about a "year over year increase" and then places it in historical context.

The Office of Management and Budget’s historical table 8.4 provides outlays by category as a percentage of GDP for the years 1962 to 2025. The 2.9 percent of GDP that "national defense" spending amounted to in 2025 is a tie for the lowest level on the whole 64-year chart. Every year of the Obama administration—not known for its reckless abandon when it came to military spending—came in higher. In 2016, the final year of the Obama administration, national defense was at 3.1 percent of GDP. At 4.5 percent of GDP, defense spending would still be lower than in every year from 1962 to 1992, even lower than in 1978 and 1979 under the anemic Carter administration that was humiliated by its failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran. In 2010, under Obama, the level was 4.6 percent of GDP, so even after a Trump-proposed increase to 4.5 percent of GDP, by the percent-of-GDP measure spending would still be below Obama levels.

You can also look at it in "constant dollars." By that measure, OMB table 8.2, in 2017 "constant dollars," the $680 billion national defense outlays for 2025 were lower than what Obama spent in 2009 to 2012, where each year the spending was more than $700 billion.

Reasonable people may differ over what the proper level is. People may disagree over how much of the worldwide burden should be borne by countries like Japan or those in Europe, and how much by American taxpayers. People may disagree about whether the U.S. should think of itself as a peacetime power or as one facing challenges from China, Russia, and radical Sunni and Shia Islam on par with the Cold War and post-September 11, 2001 eras. People may differ on whether any "peace dividend" should be spent on preparing to defend against future threats or repurposed for debt reduction, deficit reduction, domestic spending, or tax cuts. My own view is that there’s a hostile world out there full of threats. Even in a world that looks peaceful, you have to be arming up because you never know what is coming next. That was the point of Winston Churchill’s book While England Slept and President Kennedy’s book Why England Slept. To have an intelligent, informed conversation about these issues, though, you need a reasonably accurate handle on what spending is, and a decent understanding of how it fits in the historical context. The New York Times threw nine reporters at the issue and failed to illuminate it. We’re willing to fill in some of the gaps, though it’d be preferable if the Times got the story right on its own.

The Times reporter, Tony Romm, didn’t return an email seeking comment. Riedl told the Washington Free Beacon, "I provided the Times with a table of historical defense spending (nominal, real, and %GDP) that was straight out of the OMB historical tables."

I asked, "Does the Times paragraph accurately reflect your take?" and "Were you happy with the NYT paragraph or did you find it somewhat garbled?" Riedl didn’t answer directly. Riedl did say "defense spending as a percent of GDP **should** fall over 75 years because the cost of military hardware and troop compensation do not need to rise as fast as the nominal GDP to maintain the same levels. So 4.5% of GDP today buys more defense than 5%-6% of GDP did in the 1980s." One could make the same argument about healthcare, or education. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen, unlike the professors, doctors, and nurses, are putting their lives at risk in distant lands, earning pay that’s frequently less than what a New York Times fitness reporter earns.

The Times article didn’t quote or cite anyone from the defense industry or the defense department or from any advocacy groups or think tanks supportive of sharply increased defense spending. Maybe with the room the paper used to credit the eight Times reporters who contributed reporting, the editors could have squeezed in instead some sources with more diverse perspectives about the right level of defense spending.

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