No one can tell you exactly what’s in the bloated Pentagon budget and what it costs. After all, the Defense Department has never passed an audit. Still, we know it’s larded up with terrible, lethal, wasteful expenditures. There are $2.2 million Tomahawk missiles — the type that killed more than 150 Iranian civilians, most of them school children. And the Zumwalt class of naval destroyers that were billed as a $1.5 billion per ship bargain, but now cost taxpayers $10 billion each. And there are the untold sums spent by self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s department to line the pockets of online influencers. Yep, that’s a thing. American taxpayers are on the hook for all of it.

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Thankfully, there’s growing resistance to Trump’s proposals. Nearly 6 in 10 people nationwide believe even the official $1.5 trillion request is “too high,” according to a recent poll conducted by ReThink Media and the Costs of War Project at Brown University, a nonpartisan research group (where I’m a contributor). And Democrats appear to be listening: They’ve voted against Trump’s budget in unprecedented numbers as it winds through Congress. Some Republicans have also expressed concerns about supporting Trump’s proposal given fears about the rising national debt.

There are growing calls to cut the Pentagon budget by hundreds of billions of dollars without touching salaries and benefits for troops and veterans. This would still leave the country with the world’s largest military budget by far and allow Congress to reallocate the savings to programs that improve the lives of everyday Americans.

The public needs a full, accurate accounting of the military. Congress could provide an annual True Total Military Budget that tallies all of the Pentagon’s spending in one place and stop hiding funding in other agencies’ budgets. Until this happens, journalists and analysts can help by explaining the full scale of spending and no longer repeating incomplete totals.

As Trump asks for the highest military budget in the history of the world and people continue to suffer the effects of his war with Iran — which has killed and injured thousands, increased the price of gas and groceries, and risks even greater catastrophic harm globally — it’s time to have an informed debate about how much the country really needs to spend on its military.