There is a bridge in Tioga County, New York that has been rated structurally deficient for eleven years.
It is not a famous bridge. It serves a county of 48,000 people in the Southern Tier, where the population has been declining for three decades and the tax base has been declining with it. The county cannot afford to replace it. The state has prioritized other projects. The federal infrastructure money, when it comes, tends to concentrate where political leverage is greatest, which is not Tioga County.
Eleven years is not an anomaly. There are currently more than 42,000 structurally deficient bridges in the United States. The majority are in rural counties, counties with small populations, limited representation, and no lobbyists.
The money to fix them exists. It has existed for years. It is currently being spent on something else.
The Number That Changes Everything
In 2024, the United States spent $886 billion on national defense.
That figure is not a mistake and not a typo. It exceeds the combined defense spending of the next ten countries. It exceeds, by a wide margin, what the United States spends on Medicaid. It exceeds the combined budgets of the Departments of Education, Transportation, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Agriculture, combined.
The 2025 request exceeded $900 billion.
Annual interest on the national debt, a debt accumulated in large part through decades of deficit-financed military spending, has crossed $1 trillion. That $1 trillion buys nothing. It builds no roads, funds no hospitals, expands no broadband, trains no teachers. It is the carrying cost of decisions made across administrations of both parties, paid by citizens who had no direct vote on any of them.
When a family in Tioga County asks why their bridge hasn’t been fixed, the answer is not that the money doesn’t exist. The answer is that the money is committed, to a defense budget whose size is determined not primarily by strategic necessity but by something the Anti-Federalists described with precision in 1788.
The Warning From January
Brutus, the most systematic of the Anti-Federalist writers, published his eighth and ninth letters in January 1788. By this point he had already argued against the federal taxing power, the Supremacy Clause, and the scope of congressional authority. Now he turned to what he considered the most dangerous single element of the proposed Constitution: the provision for a permanent standing army.
He was specific about why this concerned him. It was not that he opposed national defense. He was not arguing for pacifism or for leaving the country unprotected. His argument was structural.
A government with the power to maintain a permanent professional army, funded by unlimited federal taxing authority, would, inevitably, over time, develop an institutional arrangement that served the army’s continuation regardless of actual strategic need.
He wrote:
“A standing army in the hands of a government placed so independent of the people, may be made a fatal instrument to overturn the public liberties… The liberties of a people are in danger from a large standing army, not only because the rulers may employ them for the purposes of supporting themselves in any usurpations of power, which they may see proper to exercise, but there is great hazard, that an army will subvert the forms of government, under whose authority they are raised, and establish one, according to the pleasure of their leader.”
But his deeper concern was fiscal and structural rather than dramatic. He did not primarily fear a military coup. He feared the quieter consequence: a permanent army would develop permanent constituencies, officers, contractors, procurement bureaucracies, the congressional districts that hosted bases and factories. Those constituencies would advocate for the army’s continuation and expansion regardless of external conditions, because the army’s continuation was in their economic interest.
An army that exists in peacetime, he argued, develops interests in its own continuation. Give it a permanent budget and a government with unlimited power to fund it, and those interests will sustain the army, and expand it, indefinitely.
The objection was not Brutus alone. The Pennsylvania Minority Report, the formal dissent signed by 21 delegates to the Pennsylvania Ratification Convention, entered into the official record on December 18, 1787, listed standing armies among its primary structural objections: “Congress may raise and maintain standing armies in time of peace… Standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, and such as exist in free countries, except in cases of actual invasion or war, are not tolerated.” These were not pamphlet writers. They were named elected delegates recording a signed dissent. The standing army objection was a formal, documented warning from the founding itself.
The Machine He Described
In 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general, the Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, the man who had defeated Nazi Germany, gave his farewell address as President of the United States. His central warning was about what he called “the military-industrial complex.”
He said:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Eisenhower was describing the institutional arrangement Brutus had predicted 173 years earlier: a permanent army, a permanent defense industry, a permanent procurement bureaucracy, and the congressional relationships that bound them together. He was not warning about foreign enemies. He was warning about domestic structural consequences of a military establishment that, once built at scale, would perpetuate and expand itself through the ordinary workings of democratic politics.
The mechanism is not conspiracy. It is incentive. A defense contractor that employs 12,000 people in a congressional district has leverage over the representative of that district that no foreign policy argument can match. A weapons program creates jobs, in factories, in supplier networks, in the engineering firms that design the components. Canceling a program costs those jobs. The representative who votes to cancel it answers to constituents who hold them.
The result: programs that exist not because they serve strategic purposes but because they serve political ones. Weapons systems the military did not request. Bases the Pentagon has asked to close for decades that Congress refuses to close. A defense budget that grows during wars and continues growing after them, because the contractors and the bases and the procurement offices don’t disappear when the shooting stops.
What Both Parties Have Done
The defense budget has grown under Republican presidents and Democratic ones. It has grown when the country was at war and when it was at peace. It has grown during periods of relative global stability and during periods of genuine threat.
The authorizations pass with bipartisan majorities. The National Defense Authorization Act, the annual bill that sets defense spending, has passed Congress every year for sixty-three consecutive years. It is the most reliably bipartisan major legislation produced by a body that can agree on almost nothing else.
Both parties have found it politically advantageous to support defense spending, for different but compatible reasons. Republicans have traditionally used it as a national security credential. Democrats have used it as employment policy, defense jobs are union jobs in many districts, and they pay well.
Both parties have used the annual defense authorization bill as a vehicle for unrelated spending and policy provisions, because a bill that passes every year by a large bipartisan margin is a reliable vehicle for anything a legislator wants to attach to it.
Neither party has proposed, in any serious legislative form, a structural constraint on the defense budget’s growth. Neither party has closed the revolving door between the Pentagon and the contractors it funds. Neither party has successfully closed more than a handful of military bases despite multiple rounds of Base Realignment and Closure commissions that recommended far more.
The military-industrial complex is not a partisan phenomenon. It is a structural one. And Brutus described the structure.
The Double Cost
The citizen in Tioga County pays for the defense budget twice.
The first payment is direct: income taxes, payroll taxes, the portion of the federal budget that flows to the Pentagon. This payment is visible on a pay stub, even if its destination is not.
The second payment is invisible: it is the bridge that hasn’t been fixed, the rural hospital that closed because Congress chose not to fund rural healthcare at scale, the broadband that didn’t reach the farm because the infrastructure appropriation was too small, the school that couldn’t hire a specialist because state budgets were squeezed by the costs the federal government didn’t cover.
Opportunity cost is real even when it is invisible. A dollar committed to a defense contractor in Northern Virginia is a dollar that did not arrive in Tioga County. The federal budget is finite. The choices about how to allocate it are real choices, even when they are made by accretion, by the sum of sixty-three consecutive defense authorizations rather than by any single decision.
The communities that most reliably send their children to serve in the military are predominantly rural. The economic consequences of a defense budget that crowds out infrastructure, healthcare, and rural investment fall most heavily on rural communities. The patriot communities bear both the human cost and the fiscal one.
This is the double payment Brutus foresaw: a standing army funded by unlimited federal taxing power does not merely cost money. It costs the alternative. And the alternative, the bridge, the hospital, the broadband, the school, is what the communities who staff the army most need.
What a Structural Argument Actually Requires
Brutus did not argue for dismantling the country’s defenses. He argued for a different structural arrangement: a militia model, in which citizen soldiers organized at the state level could be called to federal service in genuine emergencies, rather than a permanent professional army maintained in peacetime at full strength.
The militia model is not directly applicable to 2026’s strategic environment. The United States faces genuine threats that require genuine military capability. The argument is not that defense spending is inherently wrong.
The argument is that defense spending conducted without structural constraint, without a genuine mechanism for matching expenditure to strategic necessity rather than political necessity, will consistently exceed what security requires and consistently crowd out what citizens need.
What that constraint would require: genuine independence of defense procurement from the political dynamics that sustain programs beyond their usefulness. Real enforcement of lobbying restrictions on officials who move between the Pentagon and the contractors it funds. A budget process that forces explicit tradeoffs between defense and domestic investment rather than borrowing to avoid the choice. And representatives willing to vote against programs in their districts when those programs serve no genuine strategic purpose.
The last requirement is the hardest. Structural problems require structural solutions, and structural solutions require someone to absorb a political cost. The military-industrial complex endures because absorbing that cost is not individually rational for any member of Congress operating in the existing political environment.
That is the structural trap Brutus identified. A permanent army creates permanent constituencies. Those constituencies are politically powerful. The citizens who pay the opportunity cost are diffuse, their losses invisible, their connection to the defense budget several steps removed from the bridge that hasn’t been fixed.
The Bill
The $886 billion is real. The $1 trillion in annual interest is real. The structurally deficient bridges are real. The rural hospitals that closed are real.
What Brutus gave us is a language for understanding the connection between them, not as separate problems with separate causes, but as the predictable consequence of a structural arrangement he identified at the country’s founding and warned against in plain language.
He asked for an anchor. He was overruled. The army was built. The constituencies formed. The budget grew.
The citizen who wonders why their county’s infrastructure is crumbling while the defense budget exceeds the next ten countries combined is not confused. The structure produced exactly what Brutus said it would.
Understanding that is not the same as fixing it. But it is the only place that fixing it can honestly begin.
Brutus, Letters VIII and IX, January 10 and January 17, 1788. Available at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School, and the Library of Congress American Memory collection. Pennsylvania Minority Report, Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, December 18, 1787; Storing Complete Anti-Federalist Vol. 3, No. 3.11; Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961.