At a Senate hearing this week regarding the Department of Defense’s FY 2026 budget, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) told President Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that over the years the federal government has “dramatically increased defense medical research to protect the men and women in uniform.”
Durbin added, “We shouldn’t make [military service] a more dangerous situation and we ought to understand what’s going on in their minds and bodies when they serve.”
When Durbin pointed out that Hegseth’s budget cuts two-thirds of funding for defense health research, he asked, “How can that be consistent with our mutual goal of making the military life a safer life for men and women in uniform?”
Hegseth said that the medical research that Durbin described is “exactly the kind of research” he expected to find when he looked at the medical research programs, but the Defense Secretary testified that his team found hundreds of millions of dollars invested in a “boondoggle.”
.@SenatorDurbin: “Give me an example of a ‘boondoggle’ in medical research and defense health.”
@SecDef Hegseth: “We’re talking about some stuff I shouldn’t say in public. You know, marbles in the rear ends of cats. Tens of millions of dollars.” pic.twitter.com/qgAyU3wlvH— CSPAN (@cspan) June 11, 2025
When Durbin asked Hegseth to provide an example of a boondoggle in medical research and defense health, Hegseth said: “We’re talking about some stuff I shouldn’t say in public. You know, marbles in the rear ends of cats. Tens of millions of dollars.”
Unpersuaded, Durbin — also noting 40% health research budget cuts at NIH — asserted that the defense medical research cuts that Hegseth proposes will not “Make America Great Again” — and he questioned the priorities of a Pentagon that’s spending $45 million for a parade.
“Money should be put into medical research instead of wasting it on some pomp and circumstance for the President,” Durbin said. “This is not consistent with what the men and women in uniform deserve.”
In criticizing the military parade scheduled in Washington on June 14, Durbin has company on the other side of the aisle too, if not at DOD.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was recently asked about the parade and replied: “I’m not sure what the actual expense of it is. But I’m not really, you know, we were always different than, you know, the images you saw of the Soviet Union and North Korea. We were proud not to be that. And I don’t, I’m not proposing that’s the image we would want to project. But I’m worried about the image that it isn’t necessarily the best image to show.”