Trump's 'Big, Beautiful' Military Parade Is a Big, Ugly Waste of Millions of Dollars

Most Americans, it turns out, do not think it is a good use of taxpayer money, according to a recent poll.

President Donald Trump has described the upcoming military parade using a familiar theme: its size. It will be a "big, beautiful" event, he told NBC's Meet the Press last month.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The parade will, however, objectively be big, from the contents of the parade itself—25 M1 Abrams main battle tanks! Dozens of other military vehicles! Aircrafts! 6,600 soldiers marching!—to the price tag, which is currently estimated to come out somewhere between $25 million and $45 million for an approximately 90-minute event. That comes out to $277,778–$500,000 per minute.

A majority of Americans, it turns out, do not think that big cost is beautiful; 60 percent of respondents in a recent poll said the parade is not a good use of taxpayer money. The sample size was 40 percent Republican and 40 percent Democrat, with the remaining 20 percent identifying as "independent/none." 

The millions of dollars the public is paying to fund the parade—which will take place on Saturday, Trump's 79th birthday—are "peanuts," the president said, when "compared to the value." Yet it is difficult to reconcile that position with one of his hallmark campaign promises: reining in wasteful government spending.

Indeed, during the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to slash $2 trillion—the size of the budget deficit—in federal spending. That was always a bit hard to believe, particularly when considering the immense amount he added to the national debt during his first term, trillions of dollars of which came before the COVID-19 pandemic. (His recent budget is another example of his proclivity for big spending.)

Even still, it was a welcome promise. A return to fiscal sanity was the animating force behind creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly led by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. DOGE has failed to live up to its promise to the people, most notably because, as Reason Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy observed, it has been primarily concerned with "rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington." Many of those cuts needed to happen. But Trump's parade is a reminder that he is serious about cutting wasteful spending that generates splashy headlines and galvanizes his supporters while green lighting wasteful spending that generates splashy headlines and galvanizes his supporters.

Some in the GOP are willing to say so. "I would have recommended against the parade," Sen. Roger Wicker (R–Miss.) told Politico after he learned how much it would cost. Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine) added that the cost was "steep," while Sen. Ron Johnson (R–Wis.) said, "If it costs money, I won't go."

There are other reasons for skepticism. "If I say picture in your mind a military parade, I challenge anybody not to think of the Soviet Union or North Korea, because that's the only image that pops into my head," Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) recently told The Fifth Column podcast. "It's like, yeah, we can commemorate. We can talk about how great our military is. But you know, missiles and tanks in the streets just isn't a great symbol. A free country is a country with a limited government, and really not one predicated on a massive military."