For weeks, Congress has been wrapped up in passing President Trump’s big, brutal budget — the one that pays for tax cuts for the wealthy and a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget by taking food stamps and Medicaid away from people struggling to get by.

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives just barely passed this bill — it squeaked through by a single vote. Now the Senate is considering it.

Alongside trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy, the bill also gives big handouts to the Pentagon and the president’s plans to separate immigrant families. It would result in the country’s first-ever trillion-dollar Pentagon budget — and triple annual spending on the mass detention of immigrants.

There’s an army of contractors ready to profit — from the wasteful military contractors who vacuum up more than half the Pentagon budget to the private prison companies that warehouse soccer moms, pediatric cancer patients, and other immigrants caught up in the administration’s dragnet.

To fund those cruel contractors, the president’s big brutal bill cuts Medicaid and food stamps, among other programs that benefit regular people.

The human costs could be staggering. Researchers have found that the cuts to Medicaid and other health programs could lead to 51,000 preventable deaths a year. And millions of Americans who rely on food stamps could go hungry, including four million children.

None of this needs to happen.

I recently co-authored a report looking at what we could fund instead with that extra money for the Pentagon and this anti-immigrant agenda. If lawmakers just rolled back those increases alone, we could more than cover the annual cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and the Child Tax Credit combined.

In other words, by just letting the Pentagon and deportation budgets stay where they are now, we can save all of those programs — and potentially save lives.

Nationally, we found that these massive increases would be more than enough to cover the 13.7 million people at risk of losing health care — and the 11 million people at risk of losing food stamps.

That report also looked at what the bill does in every state and congressional district. In Maine, for example, the first year of additional spending on the Pentagon and deportations could keep 107,000 people on Medicaid. In Alaska, 87,000 people could stay on food stamps.

In Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, the increase just for the President’s dream of a “Golden Dome” missile shield could keep 7,500 people on Medicaid. In Kentucky’s 4th district, 6,200 people could stay on Medicaid.

Experts have said that the president’s promises for the system are too good to be true. That’s not worth risking lives by cutting medical benefits in any congressional district.

Then there’s the billions set aside for “killer robots,” drones that can use AI to target and kill people — a nightmare that could lead to more deaths in war and kill more civilians.

In California’s 5th district, the money for these dangerous weapons could instead keep more than 13,600 people on food stamps for a year. In Ohio’s 8th district, more than 11,300 people could keep their SNAP benefits.

This is truly a situation of trading life for death: we can feed hungry people, or we can create new dystopian weapons.

There’s an exceedingly simple solution to all of this: drop the extra money for the Pentagon and attacking immigrants — and keep Medicaid and food stamps available to as many people who need them as possible.

In 2024, the average U.S. taxpayer paid $3,804 for the Pentagon and war, deportations, and border militarization — an already astounding figure. We shouldn’t ask people to pay any more to line the pockets of military contractors and private prison CEOs while Americans go hungry and without health care.

——-

Federal budgeting expert Lindsay Koshgarian directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.