Overseas base spending exceeds every federal agency’s budget except Defense.

Evidence

Even with recent reductions in military spending, the annual cost to taxpayers to maintain bases and troops overseas in coming years could easily reach 100 billion or more given the conservative nature of my calculations and the Pentagon’s use of war budgets to fund nonwar activities. At these levels, if Pentagon spending abroad were its own government agency, it would have a larger discretionary budget than every other federal agency except the Department of Defense itself. Including the costs of maintaining bases and troops in war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq could bring the base nation’s total bill to 160–$200 billion—which is two to three times the size of the discretionary budget of the Department of Education, for example. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 650

Categorization

• XREF: Direct scale comparison for readers who track federal discretionary budgets; echoes Eisenhower’s guns-versus-butter framing invoked later in the chapter.