WASHINGTON—The Heritage Foundation today unveiled the Defense Budget Builder, a first-of-its-kind online tool to facilitate analysis and deliver transparency of the U.S. defense budget for lawmakers, congressional and military staff, and taxpayers.

Until now, individual line items of defense budgets have been published solely on the website of the Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller). The data is compiled in disparate files and spreadsheets, with no mechanism for viewing all the data at once.

Robert Greenway, director of the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation, explained the tool’s significance:

“We built the Defense Budget Builder to cut through the noise and make defense budget analysis accessible and efficient. For too long, this data has been buried in complex, fragmented files that frustrate even seasoned analysts. This tool empowers anyone—whether a policymaker, congressional staffer, journalist, or taxpayer—to explore and discuss how the Pentagon allocates resources.”

Senior Policy Advisor Wilson Beaver added:

“The American people deserve to know that their tax dollars are being spent wisely and focused on warfighting capabilities. With the Defense Budget Builder, we’ve created a tool that makes identifying areas of bloat or misuse and redirecting them into real military capacity possible in minutes, not hours or days. I am very proud to be part of creating a tool that can help build a Department of Defense that is more focused on building a U.S. military capable of meeting the national security needs of the American people.”

 

The Defense Budget Builder provides congressional staffers and the public a user-friendly way to facilitate more informed debate about how the Department of Defense ought to be directing spending by:

• Providing an itemized accounting of the U.S. defense budget for analysis by national security experts
• Allowing a user to create customizable defense budgets that can be saved and shared
• Making defense budget data more accessible to Americans interested in the composition of the U.S. national security budget

With the Defense Budget Builder, users can now:

• Search defense budget data by category or keyword
• Compare the defense budget of a given year against data from previous years
• Build individualized defense budgets, adding and subtracting dollar amounts from line items or adding and subtracting line items from the budget
• Specify procurement quantities, resulting in a higher or lower total defense budget
• Search for pay-fors to accommodate a budget increase elsewhere in the data

Learn more about Heritage’s defense policies and proposals.