Voters: The military makes us feel safe but not sure it’s worth a trillion

There is a growing disconnect between how American voters think about safety and how Washington spends money in the name of national security.

In a recent poll conducted by ReThink Media and the Costs of War Project at Brown University, when voters were asked what contributes to safety in daily life, they were more likely to point to friends and family or first responders than to the U.S. military. Social policies and public services, such as healthcare, education, and housing, also had significant support, with 68% of respondents stating these contributed somewhat or greatly to everyday safety.

Yet at the very moment voters describe safety in these broad social terms, the Trump administration is proposing a $1.5 trillion national security budget and arguing that domestic priorities must take a back seat to military spending.

This tension was one of the central findings of a multi-year research project sponsored by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation in partnership with Purdue University. In recent polling, 68% of voters stated that U.S. military dominance was personally “very important” or “somewhat important” to them. Yet almost two-thirds of respondents rejected the idea of limitless military spending, and 59% said the current administration’s proposed 2027 military budget of $1.5 trillion is too high.

This tension matters because the scale of spending currently under consideration is extraordinary. Our research also clarifies how advocates for a right-sized Pentagon budget need to help everyday people imagine how their government can keep them safe without continually increasing military spending.

A trillion dollars a year — the Pentagon’s current annual budget — is a massive sum, far outpacing investments in things that would address Americans’ top concerns, like healthcare and medical research, trains, roads and bridges fit for the 21st century. President Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2027 goes from the ill-advised to the virtually impossible, calling for a $500 billion one-year increase in military spending.

People are right to be concerned. America’s priorities are out of balance. President Donald Trump said it himself, telling supporters on Easter that, “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare…We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”

Agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control, which are essential in protecting the public from urgent threats like the climate crisis and mass outbreaks of disease, are slated to receive a total of less than $10 billion next year, roughly 1% of the current Pentagon budget, and less than the cost of just one week of the war with Iran.

In fact, the Iran War seems to have awakened many Americans to the harms of endless military spending in ways that the other wars of this century did not, at least not to the same degree or for as wide a swath of the public. The devastating human and economic costs of the war have prompted many citizens to question whether the United States needs to rebalance how it protects itself and its allies. This does not mean abandoning military strength, but embedding it in a larger foreign policy framework that values non-military tools of statecraft like diplomacy, economic assistance, and cultural exchanges.

The Trump administration has essentially abandoned all of these non-military forms of global influence and cooperation in favor of an all-military, all-the-time approach — the same approach that led the United States to spend $8 trillion on failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that left the world less safe and had devastating impacts not only on people in the war zones but on hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel who came home with severe physical and psychological injuries.

That is why resistance to the administration’s proposed military budget has become increasingly visible in Congress. Some lawmakers understand that their constituents are tired of politicians prioritizing military contractors over the needs of everyday people.

Our polling suggests that Americans increasingly define safety in broader terms than either the administration or most of their representatives in Congress do. While 42% of respondents said the U.S. military contributed “greatly” to their sense of safety in daily life, even larger numbers (55%) pointed to friends and family as the things that actually keep them safe, with social policies remaining important (30%) too. In short, the ability to project military force is not the only — or even primary — way many Americans understand what keeps them safe.

Indeed, in our polling 31% of voters said U.S. military action over the past two years increased foreign threats, as compared with 18% of respondents stating that historical interventions had increased threats.

Further, in focus groups and interviews with 230 participants across five U.S. field sites, we observed a similar tension between a desire for military strength and a recognition that security does not come from arms alone. In Hawaii, for example, we spoke with military families poisoned by the Navy’s Red Hill fuel leak, which contaminated drinking water for thousands of residents near Pearl Harbor. One military spouse described how the crisis completely transformed her view of the military as an institution. Yet even after years of illness and distrust, she still told us: “I recognize we need some form of defense…I don’t want to live in a country where a bomb is going to come down on us.” The military had endangered her family, but she still struggled to imagine safety without it.

Americans see that endless military spending doesn’t actually keep them safe. But if the peace and disarmament movement really wants to turn the tide and show people that a better future is possible, we need to lay out a practical plan that responds to voters’ perception that the world is unsafe. Our polling showed that even among voters who say the budget is much too high, many still viewed military dominance as important, most commonly citing the need for deterrence, global stability, and protection from foreign threats. In other words, people often perceive the world as unsafe but struggle to imagine alternatives to military solutions, even as they question whether increasing the military budget is the best response.

A hollowed-out government that values the quest for military dominance over everything else will not only fail to protect us; it will make the world a far more dangerous place for generations to come. Instead of vague debates about outmoded concepts like “peace through strength,” we need a national conversation about what would actually make America and the world safer. A $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget would have no place in such a world.