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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Issues: military budget

Trump’s False Military Equipment Claim

Trump’s False Military Equipment Claim
July 2, 2020

President Donald Trump has falsely claimed his administration invested “$2.5 trillion in all of the greatest equipment in the world” for the military. That’s approximately the total for defense budgets from 2017 to 2020, but the cost of purchasing new military equipment was 20% of that.

Yang’s Top-Gun Tale

Yang’s Top-Gun Tale
September 13, 2019

Making a point about Defense Department waste, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang related a secondhand story about a Navy fighter pilot who said that airmen routinely dumped fuel into the Pacific Ocean at the end of the fiscal year as a way to preserve the following year’s fuel budget. But the story doesn’t add up.