President Donald Trump
has proposed boosting defense spending to $1.5 trillion in his 2027
budget released Friday, the largest such request in decades, reflecting
his emphasis on U.S. military investments over domestic programs.
The sizable increase for the Pentagon had been telegraphed by the Republican president even before the the U.S.-led war against Iran.
The president’s plan would also reduce spending on non-defense programs
by 10% by shifting some responsibilities to state and local
governments.
“President Trump is committed to rebuilding our military to secure peace through strength,” the budget said.
The
president’s annual budget is considered a reflection of the
administration’s values and does not carry the force of law. The massive
document typically highlights an administration’s priorities, but
Congress, which handles federal spending issues, is free to reject it
and often does.
This year’s White House document, prepared by Budget Director Russ Vought,
is intended to provide a road map from the president to Congress as
lawmakers build their own budgets and annual appropriations bills to
keep the government funded. Vought spoke to House GOP lawmakers on a
private call Thursday.
Trump, speaking ahead of an address to the nation this week about the Iran war, signaled the military is his priority, setting up a clash ahead in Congress.
“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” Trump said at a private White House event Wednesday.
“It’s
not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all
these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis. You
can’t do it on a federal.”
Immigration enforcement, air traffic controllers and national parks
Among the budget priorities the White House called for:
-Supporting
the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and deportation
operations by eliminating refugee resettlement aid programs, maintaining
Immigration and Customs Enforcement funds at current year levels and
drawing on last’s year’s increases for the Department of Homeland
Security funds to continue opening detention facilities, including
100,000 beds for adults and 30,000 for families.
A 13% increase in funding for the Department of Justice, which the White House said would be focused on violent criminals.
-- A $10 billion fund within the National Park Service for beautification projects in Washington, D.C..
-- A $481 million increase in funding to enhance aviation safety and support an air traffic controller hiring surge.
About
two-thirds of the nation’s estimated $7 trillion in annual spending
covers the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs, as well as Social
Security income, which are essentially growing — along with an aging population — on autopilot.
The
rest of the annual budget has typically been more evenly split between
defense and domestic accounts, nearly $1 trillion each, which is where
much of the debate in Congress takes place.
The
administration is counting on its allies in the Republican-led Congress
to again push the president’s priorities, particularly the Defense
Department spending, through its own budget process, as it was able to
do last year.
It suggests $1.1 trillion for defense would come
through the regular appropriations process, which typically requires
support from both parties for approval, while $350 billion would come
through the budget reconciliation process that Republicans can
accomplish on their own, through party-line majority votes.
Congress still fighting over 2026 spending
The president’s budget arrives as the House and Senate remain tangled over current-year spending and stalemated over DHS funding, with Democrats demanding changes to Trump’s immigration enforcement regime that Republicans are unwilling to accept.
Trump announced Thursday he would sign an executive order to pay all DHS workers who have gone without paychecks during the record-long partial government shutdown that has reached 49 days. The Republican leadership in Congress reached an agreement this week on a path forward to fund the department, but lawmakers are away on spring break and have not yet voted on any new legislation.
As DOGE slashed through federal offices and Vought sought to claw back funds, Congress did not always agree.
For example, Trump sought a roughly one-fifth decrease in non-defense
spending for the current budget year ending Sept. 30, but Congress kept
such spending relatively flat.
Some of the programs that Trump
tried to eliminate entirely, such as assisting families with their
energy costs, got a slight uptick in funding. Others got flat funding,
such as the Community Development Block Grants that states and local
communities use to fund an array of projects intended mostly to help
low-income communities through new parks, sewer systems and affordable
housing.
Lawmakers
have also focused on ensuring the administration spends federal dollars
as directed by Congress. This year’s spending bills contained what Sen.
Patty Murray, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate
Appropriations Committee, described as “hundreds upon hundreds of
specific funding levels and directives” that the administration is
required to follow.
Nine Black College Students Were Arrested in 1961 for Reading at a
Segregated Public Library. Their Contributions to the Civil Rights
Movement Have Long Been Overlooked
When nine Black college students walked into
a segregated public library in Mississippi on March 27, 1961, they knew
what to expect next: Staff would call the police, and they would
probably be arrested if they refused to leave. According to local laws,
being Black in a space designated only for the white public constituted a
breach of peace. By stepping through the doors of the Jackson Municipal Library, they would be risking physical harm and verbal abuse. They might even face an angry crowd.
But the students, from the historically Black Tougaloo College, had trained for this moment. This was a sit-in, a nonviolent direct-action protest, and they were prepared. They’d been guided by the likes of Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first Mississippi field officer, who was known for his public investigation into the murder of Emmett Till and his fight against Jim Crow laws in the state; Ernst Borinski,
a Jewish lawyer who’d fled Nazi Germany, then accepted a position
teaching sociology at Tougaloo after World War II; and Tougaloo chaplain
John Mangram.
The civic-minded students wanted to effect change in Mississippi.
Entering that library would boldly oppose the state’s unyielding system
of segregation and highlight the disparities they experienced as Black
residents.
At the library, most of the students found the books they were
looking for and sat down to read. As expected, a librarian called the
police. Despite the presence of law enforcement, the Tougaloo Nine didn’t move. Eventually, the officers told them they were under arrest.
“Why can’t I go in and read a book? It comes back to that, the simplicity of it all,” says Tony Bounds,
an archivist and institutional historian at Tougaloo College. The
response to this question at the time was, “Well, you have a Black
library across town,” he adds. But the Tougaloo Nine had done their
homework. They’d specifically requested texts that weren’t available at
the Black library.
Following their arrest, the students were held in jail for more than
30 hours. Behind bars that night, Jackson Jr. reflected “on Emmett Till, the history of lynching connected with Mississippi,” as he told OC Weeklyin 2015. “The later it got that night, I was in fear of my life.”
Black community members, particularly students at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University), a nearby historically Black public school, rallied around the Tougaloo Nine and began protesting in support
of them. Although authorities had arrested the Tougaloo students
without resorting to violence, the Jackson State students’
demonstrations sparked a brutal crackdown. As the young people marched,
police officers armed with billy clubs, tear gas and dogs forcefully
dispersed their gathering.
When the Tougaloo Nine appeared in court
on March 29, police beat a crowd of Black onlookers, including Evers,
who had gathered outside the courthouse. They also attacked the group
with dogs.
The students pleaded not guilty to the breach of peace charge, but a
judge found them guilty anyway. As first-time offenders, they were each
fined $100 and sentenced to 30 days in jail, although the court ruled
that this time would be suspended if they pledged to avoid participating
in other protests. They all agreed.
In a letter to NAACP leader Roy Wilkins,
Evers wrote, “These young people exhibited the greatest amount of
courage in the face of mounting tension and were reported in our local
newspapers as being ‘orderly, intelligent and cooperative.’”
The Black community’s embrace helped keep the students afloat in the
aftermath of their sit-in. While they were in jail, this assistance “was
demonstrated most tangibly in the cookies, cakes, hot food and snacks
that individual families, mostly Black women, brought to the jail to
help support this newly forming resistance movement,” O’Brien writes.
The college’s leadership also supported the Tougaloo Nine. “After
they’re released from jail, they go back to class,” Bounds says.
“They’re not expelled.” All eventually went on to earn bachelor’s
degrees, most from Tougaloo but some from other institutions. Their
sit-in and the protests that followed had reverberated in Jackson.
College students were helping the NAACP lead the fight against
segregation and anti-Black discrimination in Mississippi’s capital.
“It’s a game-changing moment, certainly within Mississippi, which at one point in time had the highest lynching rate in the 20th century,” Bounds says.
For the students, simply reading in the Jackson library “was an act of
defiance,” Bounds says. “It was an open act. Jackson had never seen
anything like it.”
The Tougaloo Nine have only recently had their collective story told
in detail, most notably in O’Brien’s book, which was released in the
fall of 2025.
“It’s a project that is long overdue, but he had been working on it
for several years,” says Chamberlain, who was one of the book’s early
reviewers. Through interviews and deep research, O’Brien wove together
the events of March 27, 1961, and beyond. He was able to talk to all but
one of the nine students, as Pierce died before O’Brien started working
on the book.
The author places the Tougaloo Nine’s actions in the context of state
and local history. “Such a direct assault on segregation had never been
tried before in Mississippi’s capital city,” O’Brien writes. He
provides insights on the day of the sit-in, down to the weather.
That morning was cold with rain on the way.
“Lassiter remembered specifically deciding to wear a trench coat to
keep off the chill and the rain, yes, but also ‘to provide an extra
layer of protection’ against whatever beatings might come,” O’Brien
writes. According to O’Brien, Edwards later recalled, “I was very
concerned that I dress well and that I dressed warm. That I was
comfortable. That I was well protected.”
As the students approached the building, the significance of their
protest dawned on them. Janice Jackson remembered walking into the
municipal library as a “surreal” experience. “It was like I was there
doing what I was supposed to do, but I felt like I was lifted out of my
body or something,” she added, per O’Brien’s book.
The Tougaloo Nine were determined, though, and they continued in their mission.
Evers had helped the students plan the read-in. He was “an energetic man
who was committed to bringing about integration in public facilities,”
Jackson Jr. told OC Weekly. The protest was executed exactly as
planned: The Tougaloo Nine aimed to get arrested only for breach of
peace. As soon as they were placed under arrest, they got up and
followed officers’ instructions to avoid charges of resisting
detainment.
The students’ time at Tougaloo primed them all to become leaders in
their own ways. After graduating, four of the nine went on to become
educators. Lassiter served three decades in the Air Force. Anding
pursued careers in both the military and education, enlisting in the Air
Force before teaching at universities.
A tenth student who was part of the demonstration but has long been excluded from the story is Jerry Keahey. A graduating senior at the time, he was the photographer behind a frequently distributed group picture
of the nine ahead of their read-in. “That’s a really important role
because he was able to document by way of camera what was going on at
the time,” Chamberlain says. Keahey also helped the students travel to
the library that day. Driving in two separate cars, Mangram and Keahey
dropped the students off near their destination.
Tougaloo is a small private school with a big history. Known as “the oasis,”
it was founded in 1869 by the American Missionary Association, a
Christian abolitionist organization. For the past 15 years, its
enrollment has hovered around 600 to 900 students; that number would
have been even smaller in the 1960s.
“You cannot detach Mississippi’s civil rights movement from Tougaloo,” Bounds notes. “Those are two synonymous terms.”
The school fostered an environment in which the Tougaloo Nine could
grow into activists. Previous protests also laid the foundation for
these students. One of the earliest library sit-ins took place in
Alexandria, Virginia, in 1939, when a group of Black men visited a public facility that was open only to white community members. As the men picked up books and began reading, library staff called the police, who arrested them and escorted them out of the building.
In 1960, the year before the Tougaloo Nine’s protest, four Black men participated in one of the most well-known sit-ins of the era—at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. This protest inspired an array of similar demonstrations across the American South.
“You had sit-ins, you had read-ins, you had church-ins,” Bounds says. “On the coast, you had wade-ins, because the beaches were segregated.”
In an email, Kevin Strait, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture,
says, “By targeting public spaces like lunch counters and libraries,
participants directly confronted the daily practice of racial exclusion
and helped spark the public awareness and pressure that made
desegregation possible.” The Tougaloo Nine’s action was “a powerful
statement about access—and who gets to learn, gather and belong in our
shared public spaces,” he adds.
Making the public library the focus of the their demonstration put a
spotlight on the uneven distribution of educational resources to
segregated public schools. Often, Black students received “secondhand
books that are years old,” Chamberlain says. Despite 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education
decision, which deemed segregation in American public schools
unconstitutional, “states like Mississippi were rolling out
desegregation as slow as they possibly could,” she notes.
The books that the Tougaloo Nine picked up in the Jackson library, while
obscure and selected for strategic reasons, symbolized freedom.
Bradford chose Introduction to Parasitology, while Cook picked Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology—a text that “would become central to his later profession but n
Following the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, “one
of the definitions of freedom became access to education,” Chamberlain
says. “As an enslaved person, you could not be learned,
you could not know how to read. It was to keep people powerless and of
course ignorant to the world around them, and to also keep them
subservient in this status that they were born into.”
It took another three years for the goals of the Tougaloo Nine’s
sit-in to be enshrined in federal law. The students—and the broader
civil rights movement—lost a leader along the way.
In June 1963, 37-year-old Evers was murdered, shot in the back in his own driveway. Byron De La Beckwith,
a known white supremacist, was convicted of the killing three decades
later, in 1994. Evers had been working tirelessly right until the end:
Two weeks before his death, he shepherded another Jackson sit-in that
became national news.
Several Tougaloo students sat at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch
counter, where they were harassed and attacked by a hostile crowd.
The struggle for desegregation continued, and in July 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation of public facilities and race-based discrimination in the U.S.
Later, in the 1980s, some members of the Tougaloo Nine received notices
that the City of Jackson had absolved them of their breach of peace
violations. But they still faced difficult realities: “Some complained
that the misdemeanor continued to show up on their formal criminal
record for years to come,” O’Brien writes.
Today, four of the Tougaloo Nine are still living: Jackson Jr.,
Edwards, Sawyer and Lassiter. Edwards wrote about her life in the 2011
bookBack to Mississippi. Members also gathered periodically for anniversary celebrations of their sit-in.
In 2017, the state dedicated a historical marker
outside the Jackson Municipal Library to the students and their
groundbreaking action. The group’s surviving members and their families
were also honored at a local baseball game in 2022.
Back in 1961, the Jackson library’s sea of books represented everything
that the Tougaloo Nine were trying to achieve. Chamberlain says, “Just
by being able to pick up a book and having access to that knowledge, it
opened a world of opportunity for those nine young people.”
