Photo: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
For all its claims of being tight-fisted stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars, the Trump administration really is footloose and fancy free when it comes to vanity projects and symbolic measures. A 2025 estimate suggested the federal government might be on the hook for a cool half-billion to cover President Trump’s pet projects:
While imposing across-the-board layoffs, grant rescissions, and lease cancellations in federal civilian agencies, President Trump is hemorrhaging tax dollars on vanity projects and personal perks, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Trump has greenlighted nearly half a billion dollars in tax funds for vanity projects such as a military parade, a statuary garden, an upgrade to Air Force One, and new Oval Office decor.
That doesn’t count the semi-vanity project of the Triumphal Arch that some fear will obscure the Arlington National Cemetery, and will cost Uncle Sam “$2 million in special initiative funds and $13 million in matching funds,” according to OMB. And just this week, congressional Republicans proposed that taxpayers pick up the tab for Trump’s White House ballroom project, costing around $400 million.
Trump’s willing to share the Treasury’s wealth with his cronies, though. One project he has jointly sponsored with Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has been the renaming of the Department of Defense as the Department of War with a corresponding change to Hegseth’s title, which he adopted the minute Trump signed an executive order last September authorizing the makeover.
However, the power to rename a Cabinet department actually lies with Congress. And because the administration has now formally proposed that step, we have an idea how much it will cost taxpayers to undertake the vast relabeling of everything from signs and stationery to websites, military insignia, and everything else at and under the Pentagon. According to Stars and Stripes, the tab for the switcheroo is already $50 million and climbing:
A Defense Department legislative proposal sent to Capitol Hill this month estimates the name change to date has cost about $50 million, and the proposal would make roughly 7,600 conforming changes to federal law. Costs are being collected and will be available after the fiscal year 2026 is completed …
The Congressional Budget Office in January estimated that implementing the renaming of DOD could cost as much as $125 million or more depending on the scope of the change.
Actually, since cost overruns are far from unknown at the Department of Whatever It Is, the CBO suggests “a statutory renaming could cost hundreds of millions of dollars depending on how Congress and [the Defense Department] chose to implement the change.”
It’s a bargain, though, right? Beginning with a book he published in 2024, Hegseth has argued that the old Department of Defense name for the Pentagon inhibited the “warrior ethos” he values and reflected a “woke” department that was afraid to aim for victory. His clincher was that the United States has not won a war since War Department was replaced by DoD in 1947.
Far from representing the triumph of “wokeness,” DoD was created to consolidate the former War Department (which included only the U.S. Army) with the Navy Department and the new U.S. Air Force branch (part of the Army until 1947). And while the U.S. could not claim victory in wars ranging from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, it did achieve its goals in the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and the Kosovo war of 1998–99. In any event, that “woke” and namby-pamby DoD did manage to kill an estimated 1.3 million enemy military in Korea; 850,000 enemy military in Vietnam; 22,000 enemy military in the Persian Gulf War; and another 73,000 in the Iraq War. This doesn’t cover any of the civilians killed in these and other U.S. wars. It seems our forces did not lack “lethality” under the DoD brand at all.
So this expensive makeover may reflect Trump’s and Hegseth’s psychological needs more than any shortcoming in the killing power or “warrior ethos” of the U.S. military. Perhaps they will get their money’s worth in testosterone-driven self-esteem. But they’d better hope their war winning streak doesn’t end very quickly with the current conflict with Iran.
