Platform (Downloads)

PART THREE: How We Pay For It

PART THREE: How We Pay For It

The bottom line: the platform’s twenty-six commitments cost approximately $190–345 billion per year in new federal spending. Documented offsets and recoveries — every figure anchored in CBO, GAO, JCT, or Treasury scoring — provide $235–415 billion per year. The platform pays for itself at every point within the range, with $45–70 billion in budget surplus at the midpoints.

The simplest objection to any platform of this size is that it costs too much. The Sanity Project takes the objection seriously — Item 15 (Fiscal Responsibility and Honest Budgeting) is in the platform for exactly that reason. The arithmetic below is the honest answer to the honest question: where does the money come from? Four observations frame the answer:

Several of the largest items here are not new spending — they are restorations of programs the current administration has cut.
Two of the largest line items in the federal budget — defense and immigration enforcement — are spending on the wrong things, not too little spending overall.
Credible nonpartisan watchdogs (GAO, Inspectors General) have identified hundreds of billions of dollars in documented inefficiency that any serious fiscal-responsibility platform should address before talking about cuts to popular programs.
The platform’s revenue items pay for its spending items, with room to spare.

3A — Defense Realignment: Fund the Next War, Not the Last One

The Department of Defense will spend roughly $895 billion in FY 2025, and the administration’s request for FY 2026 brings the topline near $1 trillion for the first time in American history. The Sanity Project endorses a strong defense posture. It does not endorse the current allocation of that posture.

The structure of combat has changed during the careers of every currently serving officer. Hypersonic-missile development is reshaping the assumptions that drove carrier-fleet construction a generation ago. Cyber and electronic warfare are now contested domains in which the United States invests less than in any single shipbuilding program.

The Pentagon is, in plain terms, organized around the last war. Recent combat data makes the point in dollars:

In Ukraine, $400 drones routinely destroy $4 million Russian battle tanks — a 10,000-to-1 cost-exchange ratio.
In Yemen, the U.S. Navy has been shooting down $2,000 Houthi attack drones with $2 million SM-2 surface-to-air missiles.
Over Iran in 2026, a shoulder-fired MANPADS missile costing roughly $30,000–$50,000 brought down a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle valued at more than $30 million. A second U.S. aircraft — an A-10 Warthog — was also lost to comparable air-defense systems.
Ukrainian naval surface drones, costing roughly $250,000–$300,000 each, have destroyed or damaged more than a dozen Russian warships and forced the Russian Black Sea Fleet to retreat from its Crimean bases to Novorossiysk on the Russian mainland. Russian warships destroyed in those operations are valued between $65 million and $400 million each.
Against that backdrop, the U.S. Navy is now planning the construction of 15 nuclear-powered “Trump-class” battleships. The lead ship’s projected cost exceeds $17 billion — the most expensive surface combatant ever built. The 15-ship program is expected to total roughly $255 billion in procurement, with lifecycle costs projected at $500–700 billion through 2090. While armed with advanced technology, some of which is still in development, this “put all your eggs in one basket” approach could be vulnerable to drone-swarm attacks, which contradicts the Navy’s doctrine of “distributed lethality.”

A serious realignment does not reduce capability. It changes which capabilities the country pays for. Four specific commitments:

Procurement reform. Every major Pentagon program purchased in the last two decades has come in late and over budget — the F-35 program is now projected to exceed $2 trillion over its lifetime, and the Ford-class carrier overran its budget by more than $2 billion before launch. The Government Accountability Office estimates 10–15% of procurement spending could be recovered through fixed-price contracting, multi-year buy discipline, and stricter cost-plus rules. On a $300 billion procurement base, that is roughly $30–45 billion per year.
Sunset legacy platforms. Every modern military has decommissioned weapons that no longer match the threat. The platform endorses the sunsetting of platforms whose mission has been overtaken by drone, cyber, and precision-strike alternatives. The Pentagon’s own internal analyses identify $20–30 billion per year in such candidates.
Asymmetric reinvestment. The savings above should be redirected to the drone, cyber, electronic-warfare, laser-guided, autonomous-systems, and counter-drone capabilities that the country’s adversaries are using and that the country’s conflicts already turn on. This is a reallocation, not a cut.
Contractor cost discipline. The top five defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman — posted operating margins in 2024 that were higher, on average, than in any peacetime period since the Eisenhower administration. The platform endorses statutory caps on cost-plus markup, mandatory disclosure of executive compensation funded by federal contracts, and renewed application of the Truth in Negotiations Act. Estimated additional savings: $10–25 billion per year.

Net realignment available without reducing the topline: roughly $60–100 billion per year, redeployed to address the capabilities adversaries are actually using. With a modest 3% topline reduction — which would still leave the DOD roughly $970 billion in 2026 dollars — the total rises to $90–130 billion per year. The result is a stronger, more agile force, not a smaller one.

3B — Immigration Enforcement: Right-Sized for Outcomes

ICE, CBP, and related immigration enforcement budgets have grown tenfold since 2003. Reconciliation legislation enacted in 2025 added approximately $170 billion in additional enforcement spending over four years, an amount larger than the combined annual budgets of the FBI, ATF, DEA, and U.S. Marshals Service.

The return on that investment, by the administration’s own metrics, is declining. Mass-deportation operations targeting long-resident workers cost an estimated $80,000–$160,000 per removal when detention, transportation, court costs, and contractor fees are included. The same money would fund border processing, asylum adjudication, and visa modernization at a scale that would actually reduce illegal crossings — the stated goal — by closing the backlogs that create the magnet for unauthorized entry.

Item 24 (Comprehensive Immigration Reform) endorses a professional, accountable enforcement function focused on genuine public-safety threats. Right-sizing enforcement to that mission rather than to mass-deportation theater would free an estimated $30–50 billion per year while leaving the underlying enforcement infrastructure stronger, faster, and more legally durable than the current model.

3C — What the Watchdogs Actually Find

The phrase “waste, fraud, and abuse” has become a cliché in American politics, often to justify cuts to popular programs. The credible numbers tell a different story — and they are not partisan numbers. They come from the Government Accountability Office, the Office of Management and Budget, and the federal Inspectors General.

Improper Payments. Federal agencies reported approximately $186 billion in improper payments in FY 2025, across 64 programs at 15 agencies — an increase of $24 billion from the prior year. Cumulative improper payments since FY 2003 have reached roughly $3 trillion. Medicare alone accounted for $56.7 billion of the FY 2025 total; Medicaid for $37.4 billion. The remedy is process modernization and investment in verification, not program elimination.

A caveat the political rhetoric usually skips: GAO reports that approximately 82% of improper Medicare and Medicaid overpayments are due to improper documentation, eligibility verification, and administrative errors — not fraud.

The IRS Tax Gap. The IRS estimates the net tax gap — taxes legally owed but not paid on time — at $606 billion for tax year 2022 alone. CBO and Treasury scored Democratic-passed IRS modernization funding under the Inflation Reduction Act at roughly $7 in recovered revenue for every $1 invested. The math is straightforward: every dollar cut from IRS enforcement adds seven dollars to the deficit.

The Pentagon Audit. The Department of Defense failed its eighth consecutive audit in December 2025. Material weaknesses directly affected approximately $2.1 trillion (50.3%) of the Department’s $4.6 trillion in reported assets. Auditors could not verify key F-35 spare-parts inventory, part of a program now projected to exceed $2 trillion over its lifetime. The Pentagon is the only major federal agency to have never passed a financial audit. The statutory deadline for full compliance should be set for 2028.

Program Duplication. GAO’s annual fragmentation and duplication reports have, since 2011, identified specific opportunities yielding approximately $774 billion in achieved savings, with $100+ billion in additional savings available from currently open recommendations. One example: 15 federal agencies operate more than 130 distinct broadband internet programs without a unified national strategy — producing cost duplication, coverage gaps, and access barriers. Most of these recommendations are administrative, not legislative.

The pattern is consistent: real federal waste is concentrated in administrative processes that require investment in modernization, in a Pentagon that has resisted accountability for eight straight audit cycles, in an under-resourced tax-collection apparatus whose enforcement budget pays for itself many times over, and in duplicated programs that require management consolidation. None of those fixes fits the political theater of “waste, fraud, and abuse.” All of them produce real savings that the Sanity Project’s arithmetic can credibly draw on. Democrats funded the GAO and OMB, defended the Inspectors General, wrote the IRS funding that returns $7 for every $1 invested, and required the Pentagon audit by statute.

Estimated annual recovery from an evidence-based attack on these documented inefficiencies: $40–80 billion per year. This figure is intentionally conservative. CBO’s scoring of the IRS enforcement provisions alone implies a higher return; meaningful reductions in improper payments and duplicative program consolidation add to that base. The Sanity Project counts only the conservative figure in its Bottom Line.

3D — Revenue Already in the Platform

Three items already in the platform generate substantial revenue or savings:

Item 10 — Social Security Tax Cap Removal. Extends Social Security solvency for 75+ years and brings approximately $120–150 billion per year into the Social Security trust fund. This revenue is statutorily walled off from the general fund and does not offset other spending. It does, however, eliminate the projected need to cut benefits or raise the retirement age.
Item 11 — Drug Pricing Reform. CBO scored the existing Medicare negotiation authority at roughly $25 billion per year in federal savings. Extending negotiation beyond Medicare and capping out-of-pocket costs would more than triple that figure to $70–100 billion per year in federal savings, plus comparable savings for state Medicaid programs and private payers.
Item 12 — Minimum Effective Rate for $100M+ Earners. Treasury and Joint Committee on Taxation scoring of similar proposals puts the revenue impact at $35–55 billion per year.

3E — What the Platform Costs

Estimated incremental federal spending under the platform’s remaining items, in approximate annual figures (conservative midpoints from CBO, the Congressional Research Service, and mainstream policy-research scoring):

Item 13 (Housing — LIHTC expansion, conversion incentives): +$15–25 billion per year.
Item 14 (Small Business Investment): +$5–10 billion per year.
Item 16 (Energy Generation and Transmission, incremental to BIL and IRA): +$30–50 billion per year.
Item 17 (Single-Payer Pathway — public option phase): +$80–150 billion per year.
Item 18 (Break the Cycle — addiction and mental health): +$20–35 billion per year.
Item 19 (Restore NIH, CDC, and scientific infrastructure): +$15–25 billion per year.
Item 20 (Disaster Preparedness — NOAA, FEMA, Forest Service): +$8–15 billion per year.
Items 21–23 (Civil rights enforcement, equal opportunity, veterans care): +$10–20 billion per year.
Item 25 (Diplomacy, foreign assistance, treaty restoration): +$5–10 billion per year.
Item 26 (Information Ecosystem — journalism, CPB, broadband): +$2–5 billion per year.
Annual total: $190–345 billion in incremental federal spending.

The wide range reflects design choices in Item 17 (how generous the public-option subsidies are) and Item 16 (how aggressively transmission permitting reform is paired with federal financing).

3F — The Bottom Line

Defense realignment: $60–130 billion.
Immigration enforcement right-sizing: $30–50 billion.
Documented inefficiency recovery (IRS enforcement, improper-payment reduction, duplication consolidation): $40–80 billion.
Drug-pricing reform federal savings: $70–100 billion.
Minimum effective rate ($100M+ earners): $35–55 billion.
Annual total: $235–415 billion in additional revenue and budget offsets.

Net: the platform pays for itself at every point in the range. At midpoint estimates, it leaves $45–70 billion per year in budget surplus.

The ranges overlap; the midpoints match; even the low end of the offset range exceeds the midpoint of the cost range. None of this depends on rosy scoring. It depends on four premises:

The Pentagon can spend its existing budget more effectively.
Immigration enforcement can do its actual job for less than the cost of political theater.
Credible watchdogs (GAO, CBO, the Inspectors General) have already identified hundreds of billions of dollars in inefficiency that the country has been unwilling to address.
The federal government should not be subsidizing drug prices that no other country tolerates.

This is what fiscal responsibility looks like when it is used as a serious accounting principle rather than a rhetorical weapon to block popular spending.