President Donald Trump toured a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in Virginia Thursday, using the massive warship as a backdrop to push his plan to increase the Pentagon’s budget by $54 billion.
President Donald Trump: “Our military requires sustained, stable funding to meet the growing needs placed in our defense. Right now, our aging front-line strike and strike fighters, a whole aircraft, many, many aircraft, are often more likely to be down for maintenance than they are to be up in the sky. Our Navy is now the smallest it’s been since, believe it or not, World War I. Don’t worry. Gonna soon be the largest it’s been.”
On Monday, Trump proposed increasing the military budget to just over $600 billion—a nearly 10 percent increase—while deeply slashing the budgets of other agencies, including the EPA and the State Department.