Congress spends trillions on the military every year without asking how to pay for it, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said Thursday, while proposals to expand healthcare and education raise questions about funding sources.
At the “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall at the State Theatre, where she was campaigning for Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, Ocasio-Cortez made her point. More Perfect University, a progressive organization, organized the event.
Ocasio-Cortez pointed to the Pentagon’s inability to pass even one of its annual financial audits since they were introduced in 2018, claiming that Americans pay for the unchecked military spending, while their health care and education are suffering because of that.
Jackson is running against Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the November 3 election that is being watched around the country and may determine which party controls the Senate.
“First, it is just unconscionable that we spend trillions of dollars going to war, not just funding the atrocities of what’s happened in Gaza, but across the entire world,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“One of the things that I find so mind-boggling is that whenever we want to expand health care in this country, Medicare in this country, education, everyone’s first question in Washington is, we have no money. How are we going to pay for this?” she added. “As though the richest nation in the history of the world is a pauper right now. And we hear that constantly.”
“Yet, every single year, the United States Congress rubber stamps trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in current and expanded spending without anyone asking at all, how are we going to pay for this and where do we get this money from?” she said. “It’s just treated as a matter of course. It’s just, well, of course, this budget has to go up.”
According to Ocasio-Cortez, no lawmaker reexamined military spending after U.S. troops left Afghanistan in 2021.
“No one says, no one said, after we pulled out of Afghanistan, do we need to still be sustaining this level of funding? No one has asked any question to that,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded. “And by the way, the Pentagon has continued to fail every audit that they have been presented with. And so, why are we continuing to dump this money?”
“And I’m going to tell you, they are paying for it with your health care and lack thereof,” she told the crowd.
“So it’s about time that we flip that equation and start asking, how can we afford war after war after war? How are we going to afford Iran? How are we going to afford Gaza?” she said. “How do we, how can we afford these things when our folks at home can’t eat, can’t go to the doctor, and can’t rebuild a bridge to get to work?”
The Pentagon has failed every department-wide financial audit since its first one in 2018 and is the only major federal agency that has never passed one. Its most recent audit, covering fiscal 2025 and released in December, was its eighth straight failure. Auditors found 26 material weaknesses in financial reporting for a department that reported about $4.65 trillion in assets.
Defense Department officials say they’re making progress and are aiming for a clean audit opinion by 2028, the deadline set by Congress in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. When the latest results were released, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth noted that the department could not fix decades of problems with unchecked spending.
Criticism of the audit record has come from both parties. In July, Senators Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, and Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, reintroduced a bill that would withhold 2% of the budget from any Pentagon office that failed to earn a clean audit.
President Donald Trump signed a defense policy bill in December authorizing nearly $901 billion. In April, the White House asked Congress for about $1.5 trillion for defense in fiscal 2027, a record request made while the United States was at war with Iran.
Jackson, who addressed the crowd after Ocasio-Cortez, agreed.
“I mean, I couldn’t agree more. And going back to her previous comment, why wouldn’t I want to sit alongside of someone that just talked like that?” Jackson said. “That is what this country needs, is people that actually care about everyday people.”
Jackson said questions about how to pay for his proposals have followed him since he became the nominee.
“And that’s what, you know, I see, you know, in this race, it’s been really odd to me, I mean, just over 80 days, how much this has been a real flashpoint, and not just from the people I would expect, but from the media,” he said. “Like, just exactly what she just said, we can’t pay for this; how are you going to do it?”
“And, well, we do it by not wasting all the money that we have been, by taxing billionaires in a way that we should be, like, quit giving them tax cuts,” Jackson said. “I mean, it is just incredible how they’ve made people feel like asking for health care is too much in this country.”
“Everyday people that I come up to and they say, well, you know, yeah, I agree with you, but we can’t do it,” he said. “No, we can do it. We absolutely can do it, and we have to get out of that mindset.”
Jackson, who advocates for Medicare for All, said his initial move to fund expanded health care would be to end open-ended funding for the war with Iran, the Bangor Daily News reported.
A logger and former president of the Maine Senate, Jackson became the Democratic nominee on July 25 at a special convention in Bangor, succeeding Graham Platner, who withdrew from the race after denying the sexual assault allegation against him.
Collins, seeking her sixth term, has been recently campaigning with former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. Her campaign has criticized Jackson for his appearances with AOC, Sanders, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, claiming their support shows a far-left agenda of his administration.
At the town hall, Jackson then invited questions from the audience.
“All right, everybody, I want to see hands,” he said.
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