A trillion dollar Defense budget

The White House “proposes unprecedented increases for defense and border security.”

This weekend’s rain in Albuquerque was glorious. What else can I say about that?

Last week, White House Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought (architect of Project 2025) sent the Trump administration’s budget request for next year to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

In his May 2 letter, Vought wrote that the White House seeks to cut non-Defense budget spending by 22.6 percent, or $163 billion.

This includes drastic cuts to agencies ranging from the Department of the Interior and FEMA to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service.

According to Vought: “The recommended funding levels result from a rigorous, line-by-line review of FY 2025 spending, which was found to be laden with spending contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche non-governmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life.”

Meanwhile, the White House wants to increase the annual Defense budget by 13 percent — to $1.01 trillion.

The request, Vought wrote, “proposes unprecedented increases for defense and border security.”

Just a reminder that the U.S. military is already the largest single contributor of greenhouse gases. Further increasing the Pentagon’s budget and carbon footprint is an all-out act of war against the entire planet.

Greg Mello with the Los Alamos Study Group pointed out that if this budget is passed, it will be the first time that national security funding exceeds a trillion dollars.

In an email, Mello also noted that the administration is proposing the “largest year-on-year increase in nuclear warhead spending since 1962.”

To read the 46-page letter and program-by-program budget request, visit the White House website.

Things I’m Consistently Obsessed With:

Miles dry in the Middle Rio Grande, as of Monday: 28

Total area of NM in drought: 96.4 percent

Gila River at the Gila gauge (downstream of the wilderness boundary): 37 cubic feet per second

95-year daily median for that same location and date: 110 cfs

More on Drought:

Snow Drought Current Conditions and Impacts in the West (May 1, NOAA) Some key points for New Mexicans:

• Snowpack melted rapidly across Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, with snow disappearing one to four weeks earlier than usual.

• Water year peak snow water equivalent (SWE) in the Southwest was far below median, and many locations received record-low snow for the winter season.

• Water supply forecasts for the Colorado Basin declined compared to April 1 projections, likely due to dry conditions, rapid snowmelt, and early melt out.

• The six-to-ten-day outlook from the Climate Prediction Center favors cooler-than-normal conditions and above-average precipitation across the central Rockies and Southwest, which could help to slow the melt of snow that remains.

Environmental News & Essays:

• Draft Strategic Plan for Trump's Interior Department Would Boost Extractive Industries, Cut Protections (Jimmy Tobias, Chris D’Angelo, and Roque Planas, Public Domain)

• Defunding of Rio Grande Endangered Species Program threatens long-term impact (Bryce Dix, KUNM)

• Trump’s budget agenda: Billions of cuts for conservation, public lands (Danielle Prokop, Source NM)

• Protect Tesuque's Supreme Court petition could bring wastewater 'impacts throughout the state' (Cormac Dodd, Santa Fe New Mexican)

• Sewage flooding cells inside Torrance County ICE prison again, advocates say (Austin Fisher, Source NM)

• River guides navigate low runoff, shifting industry (Emery Veilleux, Taos News)

• ‘De-extinction’ isn’t real, but the conservation questions it raises are (Ethan Linck, High Country News)

• We must fiercely defend our national monument (Heath Haussamen)

Upcoming Events & Public Comment Periods:

• New Mexico Water Dialogue Annual Meeting (May 15)

• New Mexico Climate Action Plan sector-based community conversations

• Public comment period on changes to the Endangered Species Act is open until May 19

Reporter Andy Lyman and I just launched the Lesser Known New Mexico Podcast. Andy and I worked together at New Mexico Political Report during the first Trump administration, and we’re coming back together! Most recently, Andy was editor of The Paper and City Desk ABQ, and you might remember him from the Santa Fe Reporter or KUNM.

Check out the Lesser Known New Mexico Podcast, and tell all your friends they can follow or subscribe for free on Substack, Spotify, and Apple!

For the book nerds:

Currently reading: Tommy Orange’s 2024 novel, Wandering Stars

Can’t wait to read: Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness and Belonging. Edited by James Crews and Brad Peacock

Planning to re-read: Common Ground on Hostile Turf: Stories from an Environmental Mediator, by Lucy Moore

Lastly, I find this 2015 video of Amy Poehler and Jack Black singing “The Rose” deeply satisfying.