Defense Spending Rising While Civilian Agencies Face Cuts Through 2035

The story of the next decade isn’t about scarcity. It’s about selection. Defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts isn’t an accident, and it isn’t some law of nature. It’s the result of repeated votes, repeated budget rules, and repeated carve-outs that treat the Pentagon like a protected class. If you’re wondering why your local systems feel like they’re running on fumes while the military budget keeps finding oxygen, you’re already seeing the plot.

Federal budget projections through 2035 tell a story Washington won’t say out loud: defense spending rising is guaranteed, while everything else is negotiable. This isn’t fiscal responsibility. It’s fiscal selection—a deliberate choice about who matters and what gets funded. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s 2024 Budget and Economic Outlook, defense discretionary spending is projected to grow steadily through 2035, while nondefense discretionary spending—the bucket that funds public health, education, housing, infrastructure, and regulatory enforcement—faces a decade of stagnation or outright decline as a share of GDP. That’s not a forecast. That’s a priority map.

What the 2025-2035 Budget Projections Actually Show

The Congressional Budget Office’s baseline projections through 2035 lay out the math in black and white. Defense discretionary spending is set to climb from approximately $874 billion in fiscal year 2024 to over $1 trillion by 2035, according to CBO data. Meanwhile, nondefense discretionary spending—which funds nearly every civilian agency—is projected to grow far more slowly, if at all, when adjusted for inflation and population growth.

Here’s the blunt translation: defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts is what happens when “discretionary” becomes code for “politically optional.” Defense gets baseline growth built into every budget. Civilian agencies get annual battles, continuing resolutions, and the threat of shutdowns. The pattern is clear: one side of the ledger is protected by political gravity, and the other side is treated like a bargaining chip.

The Office of Management and Budget’s historical tables confirm the trend. From 2010 to 2024, defense spending as a percentage of GDP has held relatively steady, while nondefense discretionary spending has declined significantly. Projections through 2035 show this gap widening further. Defense spending rising isn’t a reaction to new threats—it’s locked in by multi-year weapons programs, long-term overseas commitments, and the political calculation that cutting defense is harder than cutting everything else.

Net interest costs are also consuming a larger share of the budget, which means less room for both defense and nondefense spending. But guess which category gets squeezed when the math doesn’t add up? Defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts is a forecasted outcome of today’s budget process—not a surprise event. It’s the result of rules written to protect one priority above all others.

Which Civilian Agencies Get Squeezed

Civilian agencies that fall under nondefense discretionary spending get trapped in the annual squeeze. These aren’t minor programs—they’re the infrastructure of daily life. Public health capacity, including staffing for disease surveillance and emergency preparedness, relies on this funding. Education support programs that help students succeed? Same bucket. Housing assistance and homelessness response infrastructure? Also nondefense discretionary.

Transportation project delivery and safety oversight agencies operate on these budgets. Environmental enforcement, workplace safety inspections, and science funding that isn’t tied to military applications all compete for the same shrinking pool. According to the Government Accountability Office’s 2023 report on discretionary spending, nondefense agencies have faced persistent staffing shortages and deferred maintenance on critical programs due to budget constraints.

The lived reality is straightforward: defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts means longer waits for services, slower inspections, fewer competitive grants, worse maintenance on public infrastructure, and less enforcement of safety and environmental regulations. Politicians can claim they haven’t cut anything “important” because the programs still technically exist. But capacity is policy. When agencies can’t hire enough inspectors, can’t process applications quickly, or can’t maintain oversight, the mission fails even if the line item survives.

Defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts is how you get a country that can buy cutting-edge hardware but can’t run basic public systems at scale. We can fund the next generation of fighter jets while EPA inspections lag, food safety checks slow down, and housing assistance waitlists stretch for years. That’s not efficiency. That’s a priority statement.

Why Defense Spending Rising Regardless of Domestic Needs

The mechanics behind defense budget growth 2035 aren’t complicated—they’re just politically untouchable. Multi-year weapons programs create “must-pay” momentum. Once a program is approved, canceling it becomes a political liability. Jobs are distributed across congressional districts, making every major defense contract a jobs program that members of Congress defend fiercely.

Long-term overseas commitments and military posture normalize baseline growth. Once troops are stationed somewhere, once a military relationship is established, the spending becomes permanent. What starts as a temporary deployment becomes a decades-long commitment with automatic budget increases. Security framing wins in Congress because it’s politically safer than defending domestic spending line by line.

Budget rules and spending caps get negotiated in ways that protect defense first. When sequestration hit in 2013, defense cuts were treated as a crisis requiring immediate fixes. Nondefense cuts? Those became the new normal. Even when caps were lifted, defense got larger increases than civilian agencies. Opposition to cutting the defense budget is bipartisan and constant, while support for domestic agency funding requires annual political battles.

Defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts is what happens when fear is a more reliable appropriations strategy than solving problems. Members of Congress can vote for another aircraft carrier without explaining how it helps their constituents directly. But voting for housing assistance or public health infrastructure requires detailed justification, and even then, it’s vulnerable to being labeled as wasteful spending.

The pattern is clear: defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts is the predictable product of who has leverage, not who has need. Defense contractors have lobbying budgets, geographic distribution, and revolving-door relationships with Pentagon officials. Civilian agencies have annual appropriations fights and the burden of proving their value every single year.

How Defense Spending Rising While Civilian Agencies Face Cuts Hits Real Life

Healthcare and Public Health Capacity

When defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts, public health becomes reactive instead of preventive. The CDC, FDA, and other public health agencies rely on nondefense discretionary funding. Fewer inspectors mean slower response times during disease outbreaks. Weaker surveillance systems mean problems aren’t caught early. Prevention programs get defunded because they don’t generate immediate visible results.

The pandemic exposed the cost of decades of public health underfunding. Supply chain failures, testing delays, and inconsistent guidance weren’t just failures of coordination—they were failures of capacity. Agencies that had been running lean for years couldn’t scale up when needed. Healthcare benefits for Millennials and Gen Z are already squeezed by rising costs; weakening public health infrastructure makes everything worse.

Education Funding and Workforce Development

When defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts, education policy becomes a culture-war sideshow while the actual resource pipeline shrinks. Federal education programs—grants for low-income students, teacher training, school infrastructure—all compete within nondefense discretionary. As that bucket stagnates, programs get cut or capped, even as costs rise.

The result? More students graduate with debt because grant programs don’t keep pace with tuition. Schools in lower-income areas can’t afford updated materials or competitive teacher salaries. Workforce training programs that could help workers transition into new industries get underfunded. Student loan debt by generation shows the compounding effect of these choices: each generation pays more for less support.

Infrastructure Maintenance and Project Delivery

When defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts, “infrastructure week” stays a meme because the agencies responsible for delivering projects get throttled. The Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Transit Administration, and other infrastructure agencies depend on nondefense discretionary funding for operations and oversight. Even when Congress passes infrastructure bills, the agencies tasked with executing them face staffing shortages and budget constraints.

Bridges get inspected less frequently. Transit systems defer maintenance. Safety oversight becomes less rigorous. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act authorized billions in new spending, but if the agencies managing those funds can’t hire staff or process grants efficiently, projects stall. Defense spending rising means we can fund military construction projects on bases worldwide while domestic infrastructure crumbles.

Housing Assistance and Homelessness Response

When defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts, housing becomes crisis management: shelters, emergency vouchers, temporary fixes. Prevention costs money upfront—rental assistance programs, affordable housing development, and supportive services that keep people housed. Those programs live in nondefense discretionary, which means they’re always vulnerable.

HUD voucher programs have years-long waitlists. Homelessness prevention programs get cut despite being more cost-effective than emergency services. The result is a system that responds to crises instead of preventing them. Meanwhile, defense budget growth 2035 is locked in by multi-year commitments that never face similar scrutiny.

Science and Innovation Funding

When defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts, research gets steered toward military-adjacent priorities while civilian science fights for leftovers. The National Science Foundation, NOAA, NASA’s Earth science programs, and the Department of Energy’s research divisions all depend on nondefense discretionary funding. As that funding stagnates, research priorities shift toward whatever can be justified as defense-related.

Climate research gets deprioritized unless it can be framed as national security. Basic science loses ground to applied military research. The innovation pipeline narrows because funding flows toward defense contractors and away from universities and independent research institutions. Defense spending rising doesn’t just crowd out civilian science—it distorts the entire research ecosystem.

Regulatory Agencies and Enforcement Capacity

When defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts, enforcement becomes selective. The EPA, OSHA, the NLRB, and financial regulators all operate on nondefense discretionary budgets. Fewer staff means fewer inspections, slower rulemaking, lighter penalties, and less oversight. Capacity is policy: when agencies can’t enforce rules, the rules become suggestions.

Workplace safety inspections slow down. Environmental violations go unpunished. Financial fraud gets harder to detect. The result is a regulatory system that exists on paper but can’t function at scale. Meanwhile, defense contractors navigate a procurement system with built-in protections and guaranteed payment schedules.

Who Makes Defense Spending Rising While Civilian Agencies Face Cuts Happen

Congress creates this system through a combination of electoral incentives and budget rules. Defense dollars are geographically distributed—subcontracts, manufacturing facilities, military bases—which means nearly every congressional district has a stake in defense spending. Voting “yes” on another defense bill generates local headlines about jobs and security. Voting “yes” on housing assistance or public health funding? That requires detailed justification and leaves members vulnerable to attacks about wasteful spending.

The defense contractor ecosystem reinforces this dynamic. Lobbying budgets, campaign contributions, and revolving-door hiring ensure that defense industry priorities get heard. Program complexity makes cancellation politically and technically difficult. Once a weapons system is in production, killing it means job losses, sunk costs, and political backlash. Vietnam draft dodgers became war hawks for a reason—being pro-military is politically safer than being skeptical.

Military commitments create their own momentum. Once a posture becomes “normal,” the spending becomes “baseline,” and “baseline” becomes “untouchable.” Overseas bases, security partnerships, and training missions all require ongoing funding. Each commitment adds to the baseline, and the baseline grows every year. Defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts is a choice upheld by incentives—electoral, industrial, and institutional.

Gerrymandered districts further insulate members of Congress from accountability. Safe seats mean less pressure to justify spending priorities to a diverse electorate. Defense spending is a safe vote. Civilian agency funding cuts are easy to hide because the consequences are diffuse and slow-moving.

Why Civilian Programs Get Labeled “Discretionary” While Defense Is Untouchable

Budget language matters. “Discretionary” sounds neutral, but in practice, it means “first on the chopping block when politicians want to look tough.” Defense gets framed as “security,” and “security” gets exempted from skepticism. Civilian programs must prove value every year; defense programs only need political cover.

This framing isn’t accidental. It’s the product of decades of budget negotiations where defense spending was treated as mandatory and everything else was negotiable. Even when civilian agencies deliver measurable results—lower disease rates, safer workplaces, cleaner air—they’re still vulnerable to cuts. Defense spending, by contrast, rarely faces similar scrutiny. Cost overruns, failed weapons programs, and wasteful procurement practices get justified as necessary for national security.

Defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts is what you get when the burden of proof is one-sided. Civilian agencies are expected to justify every dollar, demonstrate efficiency, and accept cuts as fiscal discipline. Defense agencies get multi-year funding, built-in inflation adjustments, and emergency supplementals whenever they need more. The asymmetry isn’t an oversight—it’s built into the system.

The Boomer-Era Political Legacy That Set the Trap

The same political class that spent decades preaching “small government” kept the most expensive part of government politically sacred. Reagan-era rhetoric about government inefficiency targeted social programs, not defense budgets. The result isn’t lean governance—it’s lopsided governance. Defense spending expanded while domestic programs got squeezed, creating the budget imbalance we’re living with now.

Defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts is what happens when “government is the problem” rhetoric only targets the parts of government that help regular people. Tax cuts for the wealthy were framed as pro-growth. Defense spending was framed as pro-security. Domestic investment was framed as wasteful. That framing shaped budget rules, congressional incentives, and voter expectations for decades.

The generational impact is clear: Boomers built a political system that prioritizes military capacity over domestic capacity, then told younger generations they can’t afford student debt relief, universal healthcare, or climate action. It’s not that we can’t afford these things—it’s that the budget process is designed to prevent them. The same Congress that finds billions for defense budget growth claims poverty when asked to fund housing, education, or public health.

What Defense Spending Rising While Civilian Agencies Face Cuts Signals About National Priorities Through 2035

Expect a decade where military capacity is treated as identity and domestic capacity is treated as optional. “We can’t afford it” will apply to civilian life, not defense growth. The pattern is set: baseline defense spending increases, supplemental defense appropriations when needed, and annual battles over everything else.

The projections through 2035 aren’t predictions—they’re priorities made visible. Every budget is a values document. When defense spending gets automatic growth and civilian agencies get squeezed, that’s a statement about who matters. When weapons programs get multi-year funding and housing programs fight for scraps, that’s a choice about what kind of country we’re building.

Defense spending rising while civilian agencies face cuts is a priorities document—written in numbers, enforced in public life. The next decade will show whether younger generations can change that equation or whether the system built by previous generations is too entrenched to reform. The baseline is already set. The trajectory is clear. The only question is whether we’re willing to demand something different.

A nation that can fund everything except itself is making a choice. That choice has consequences—longer waitlists for housing assistance, fewer public health inspectors, crumbling infrastructure, underfunded schools, and regulatory agencies that can’t enforce the law. Those aren’t accidents. They’re the predictable results of a budget process that treats defense as sacred and everything else as negotiable. The numbers don’t lie. The projections through 2035 tell the story. The only question is whether anyone in Washington is willing to admit it.