Politics & Government
NewsOnScale Staff
October 24, 2026
Every dollar of it comes from American taxpayers. Not one of them voted on how it gets spent.
For fiscal year 2026 the United States government requested $81.9 billion for the National Intelligence Program and $33.6 billion for the Military Intelligence Program. That is $115.5 billion — this year alone — for the intelligence apparatus of the United States government.
That number is the topline. It is the only number the Director of National Intelligence is legally required to disclose. Congress approves it. The public sees it. Everything below it — which agency gets what, which programs exist, what the money actually does — is classified.
You are funding it. You are not permitted to know what you are funding.
What $115.5 billion looks like
NASA's entire budget is approximately $25 billion. You could fund NASA four times over with the intelligence budget alone.
The IRS costs about $12 billion to operate. The intelligence community costs nearly ten times what it costs to collect all federal income taxes.
The entire Department of Education budget is approximately $80 billion. The United States spends more money spying — on its own citizens and on the world — than it spends educating American children.
And that is only the disclosed number.
The black budget
In 2013 Edward Snowden leaked a 178-page classified budget summary showing $52.6 billion in intelligence spending that had never been publicly disclosed. The document revealed that the CIA, NSA, and National Reconnaissance Office consumed 68% of that funding. It revealed covert action programs, offensive cyber operations, foreign militia payments, and drone operations that Congress had never publicly debated and the American people had never voted on.
That was 2013. The budget has grown every year since.
The black budget — classified programs that evade standard audit trails, funded through compartmented accounting specifically designed to prevent outside scrutiny — exists on top of the disclosed $115.5 billion. Nobody outside a handful of congressional committee members knows exactly how much larger it is. Those committee members are not permitted to discuss what they learn in those classified briefings.
The people funding it are the last to know.
18 agencies. 107,000 employees. One topline number.
The United States Intelligence Community consists of 18 agencies. Most Americans cannot name five of them.
The CIA. The NSA. The Defense Intelligence Agency. The National Reconnaissance Office — which operates classified spy satellites. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — which analyzes satellite imagery. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence — created in 2004 to coordinate the other 17. The intelligence components of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space Force, Coast Guard, State Department, Treasury Department, Energy Department, and Department of Homeland Security.
107,000 employees. $115.5 billion. One number disclosed to the public.
The broader apparatus
Intelligence is only part of what American taxpayers fund without meaningful accountability.
The Department of Homeland Security was created in 90 days following the September 11 attacks — the largest reorganization of the federal government in American history, rushed through while the country was in shock. It now employs 260,000 people and costs approximately $60 billion per year. It has never been comprehensively evaluated against its original mission.
The Department of Justice employs 115,000 people at a cost of approximately $40 billion per year. It just filed a preemptive lawsuit to block certification of a Senate election at the personal direction of the President of the United States.
The Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2026 is approximately $850 billion.
The Federal Reserve — which controls the money supply that determines what every dollar American taxpayers earn is actually worth — has never been fully and independently audited. The last partial audit, conducted in 2011, revealed $16 trillion in secret emergency loans to banks and foreign financial institutions that no American voted for and almost no American knew about until the audit forced disclosure.
What the taxpayer gets
No line item detail on intelligence spending. No audit results. No performance evaluations against stated mission. No public accounting of which foreign governments receive covert support. No disclosure of which domestic surveillance programs exist. No vote on covert military operations conducted in their name. No say in which foreign militias receive payment from their tax dollars.
They get a tax bill. The bill arrives. The money leaves. What it funds is classified.
The founders designed a republic in which the people were sovereign and the government was their servant. They wrote a Constitution that required congressional approval for expenditures and demanded accountability for public funds. They specifically designed a system to prevent the accumulation of unaccountable power.
What exists today is the largest permanent national security and intelligence apparatus in human history — consuming over $1 trillion per year in disclosed spending, an unknown additional amount in classified programs, employing hundreds of thousands of people whose work the public cannot scrutinize, and operating programs the public cannot name.
The people who built this apparatus have never asked the taxpayers who fund it for permission. They have never submitted to a full independent audit. They have never justified their existence against their stated missions in any public forum.
They just send the bill.
And the taxpayers pay it.
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