Parallel Campaigns

Even before Trump bombed Iran and Republicans passed their spending bill, the parallels between the current administration and the Bush administration had already become apparent in its lawless deportation crusade, aptly compared to Bush’s “war on terror.”

Since entering office, Trump officials have carried out their mass deportation campaign with the same flagrant disregard for civil liberties and the rule of law that Bush officials displayed two decades ago. They have also employed many of the same legally dubious tools and tactics, from mass surveillance to the use of foreign prisons and offshore detention facilities like Guantanamo Bay.

Like the war on terror, the administration’s crackdown on immigrants is also being carried out under the pretext that America is defending itself against a dangerous and ubiquitous enemy. The administration has designated multiple Latin American gangs as “terrorist” organizations, while labeling migrants like Kilmar Ábrego García as “terrorists” in order to deprive them of any due process. In an internal memo, one top Homeland Security official recently compared the presence of undocumented immigrants in the United States to having “Al Qaeda or ISIS cells and fighters operating freely” inside the country.

While most commentary on the “Big Beautiful Bill” has focused on the tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, equally harmful is the massive new spending on Trump’s militarization and deportation drives. More than half of the new funding approved by Republicans will go toward border security and immigration enforcement, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) receiving the largest cash infusion.

The agency currently terrorizing immigrant communities across the country is set to receive a whopping $18.7 billion in supplemental funding each year until 2028, effectively tripling its budget and making it the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country by a wide margin. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will also receive an additional $65 billion over the next several years on top of its $20 billion annual budget, with $47 billion of that money earmarked for the construction of a border wall with Mexico.

Altogether, the $170 billion in new funding for the Trump administration’s deportation drive is greater than all other expenditure on policing by state and local governments combined. The remaining $156 billion in new funds will go to the military, adding to the Defense Department’s already bloated $899 billion budget for 2025 and putting defense spending over the $1 trillion threshold for the first time in history.

War Is a Cash Cow

These numbers rival the exorbitant spending at the height of the war on terror. During the Bush years, the defense budget doubled from less than $300 billion in 2001 to nearly $600 billion in 2008. This did not include the trillions of additional dollars spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. A staggering amount of that money went to private companies like Halliburton (of which Vice President Dick Cheney was former CEO), which was awarded tens of billions in contracts — often no-bid — for the Iraq War. Another notorious contractor, private military company Blackwater (founded by top Republican donor and brother of Betsy DeVos, Erik Prince), saw its federal contracts grow exponentially after 9/11 from $736,906 in 2001 to over $593 million by 2006.

Blackwater and Halliburton were among a long roster of profiteering contractors during the war on terror. By 2007, there were 180,000 “private contractors” from 630 companies on the US payroll in Iraq — more than the 160,000 actual soldiers deployed to the country. Between 2000 and 2005, the fastest-growing part of the discretionary budget came from contracting for goods and services, most of which came from the Defense Department. According to one analysis, military spending on contracting soared from $140 billion at the start of the war to $380 billion by Bush’s final year in office.

This boon for contractors was not just the inevitable result of two expensive wars and an international campaign against terrorism but a direct consequence of the Bush administration’s commitment to outsourcing government operations and functions to private industry. This commitment aligned with its goal of downsizing the federal bureaucracy. Indeed, much like Trump’s ongoing assault on federal workers, Bush sought to downsize the government and put forward a radical plan to privatize up to 850,000 federal jobs or close to half of the civilian workforce.

In her 2007 article “Outsourcing Government,” Naomi Klein documented the Bush administration’s vision of a “hollowed-out government run everywhere possible by private contractors,” where for-profit companies “treat the state as an ATM, withdrawing massive contracts to perform core functions [and] making deposits in the form of campaign contributions.” Almost all of this new spending came from the war on terror, which was “best understood not as a war but as a sprawling new economy . . . based on continued disaster and instability.”

In addition to the wars overseas, the administration’s anti-terror crusade spawned a lucrative new homeland security apparatus, anchored by the Department of Homeland Security and its accompanying agencies. “In just a few years,” wrote Klein, “the homeland security industry, which barely existed before 9/11, has exploded to a size that is now significantly larger than either Hollywood or the music business.”

Nearly two decades on, homeland security remains what Scott Amey of the watchdog group POGO describes as a “cash cow” for contractors, who are predictably lining up once again to get a cut from the GOP’s latest spending spree. “Immigration enforcement is big business for contractors. Billions of dollars are going out the door quickly,” says Amey, warning that government oversight is being sidelined as the administration races to accelerate deportations. In the months and years to come, an army of contractors will be offering their services and products to assist the administration in registering and detaining undocumented immigrants, building the border wall, and providing surveillance technologies (software, drones, facial recognition, etc.) to monitor the border and immigrant communities. “With the agency outsourcing nearly all of this work, companies don’t hesitate to get a piece of the pie,” added Amey. “They see money being thrown around, often quickly and without taxpayer protections, and they seize the opportunity.”

In the Bush era, contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater became the brazen faces of disaster capitalism. Today that mantle has been passed to private prison firms like CoreCivic and surveillance tech companies like Palantir, which has quickly become the new avatar of the burgeoning police state.

Few companies have thrived more during Trump’s second term than Palantir, which was cofounded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel at the height of the war on terror in 2003. The data analytics company has seen its revenue from the US government surge by 53 percent in the second quarter of this year, propelling its quarterly revenue to over $1 billion for the first time ever. Part of this growth has come from the administration tapping the company to sift through the government’s vast trove of confidential data to help track migrants. Over the last twelve months, the corporation’s stock price has soared by more than 500 percent to reach an astronomical $430 billion market valuation, making it arguably the most overvalued company in the world.

While Palantir has benefited from the new administration’s insatiable appetite for surveillance technology, few companies are set to benefit more from its demand for detention services than private prison firms like CoreCivic, which recently reported over 100 percent growth in its quarterly net income. Of the $75 billion in new funding for ICE, about two-thirds — $45 billion, or $11.25 billion per year — will be spent on the detention of immigrants. This represents a 400 percent increase from 2024 and is more than the entire budget for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Currently, 90 percent of people in ICE custody are being held in facilities operated by companies like CoreCivic and its largest competitor, GEO Group.

This new funding will likely double the detention capacity for immigrants from 56,000 beds to over 100,000. In CoreCivic’s recent earnings call, the company reported that revenue from its largest government partner, ICE, has already been on an upward trajectory as “nationwide detention populations under ICE custody reached an all-time high.” In the words of the CEO, Damon T. Hininger, the company has never “had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now.”

As billions of federal dollars flow into the coffers of private companies like CoreCivic and Palantir, the Trump administration continues to carry out mass layoffs across the federal workforce. Since January, the civilian workforce has already declined by roughly 200,000 employees and is likely to hit around 300,000 by December, representing the largest single-year reduction since World War II. If history is any indicator, this massive reduction in force will only increase the government’s dependence on private contractors that cost substantially more than government employees and increase the likelihood of corruption.

A Domestic Forever War

In 2016, when many of his fellow Republicans were accusing him of repeating liberal talking points about the war in Iraq, Trump insisted that he was actually “more militaristic than anybody in the field.” If one listened closely, it was clear that Trump was no less a militarist than the neocons who he regularly berated. If anything, he was far more openly jingoistic and bellicose than the ideologues who had led America into two calamitous wars overseas.

While critics long accused the Bush administration of invading Iraq to capture its oil reserves, Trump criticized the previous president for failing to do so: “We go in, we spend $3 trillion, we lose thousands and thousands of lives, and then  . . . what happens is we get nothing. You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils.” He also proclaimed his unqualified support for torture, whether or not it actually worked, which by then many Republicans had disavowed. “If it doesn’t work,” the candidate said, “they deserve it anyway for what they’re doing.”

Trump set himself apart from the neocons not by rejecting war or militarism but by discarding the pretense of safeguarding “democracy” and promoting “freedom” overseas — long a hallmark of their rhetoric. Instead, he portrayed the world as a jungle where only the strongest and most ruthless survived while stoking fear of the enemies within. At the time, some commentators labeled Trump a “nationalist” and his opponents, whether liberals or neocons, “globalists.” But this was a gross mischaracterization of neocons, who were hard-line nationalists themselves.

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey pointed to the “dual character” of the nationalism espoused by the neocons then in power. On the one hand was the presumption that it is the “manifest destiny of the US to be the greatest power on earth” and a “beacon of freedom, liberty, and progress.” On the other was revanchist nationalism that obsessively pointed to enemies and evil forces threatening the country from within and without, leading to the “extensive militarization at home and abroad.”

Following Trump’s lead, today’s Republicans have mostly dispensed with the lofty rhetoric about “democracy” and “freedom” while doubling down on the paranoid nationalism that invariably fuels militarization. The Trump administration’s militarism has been chiefly directed at internal “enemies,” whether undocumented immigrants who have “invaded” America, dissident students who criticize Israel, or those on the Left who the administration is now attempting to brand as “terrorists.”

In his recent speech to all of the US military’s generals, the president openly stated that he will use the military to enforce his domestic agenda and target his foes at home. Citing a “war from within,” the president described his political opponents as “no different than a foreign enemy” and promised to deploy more troops to Democratic cities that will serve as “training grounds for our military.” The administration’s war on internal enemies may prove to be nearly as lucrative for private companies as past conflicts overseas.

Two decades after the war on terror, we are in danger of entering what has been described as a “domestic forever war,” with those in power turning the military and surveillance state against Americans. And one decade after the neoconservative movement’s supposed demise, the new neocons are proving to be every bit as venal and bloodthirsty as their predecessors.