As President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” moves into the House for a vote, another budgetary outrage—little noted but quite substantial—is quietly playing out.

It turns out that the Pentagon had removed some “excess” money from its account for the Sentinel, the new intercontinental ballistic missile, which had been experiencing enormous cost overruns. The money is left over from the budget passed last year, and the excess stems from a “restructuring” in the program, brought on by a formal audit that the cost overruns triggered.

This could have been good news, if Trump had followed a different path. The surprise savings could have been refunded to the Treasury, or rerouted to some other military program—say, to fund more munitions for Ukraine, which the Defense Department has halted, supposedly because of shortages in our own stockpiles, or (here’s a novel idea) to fill some of the gaps caused by the Trump budget’s drastic cuts in domestic programs.

But no, the money—at least $400 million over the next few years, a Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to me—will be spent on converting the luxury 747 passenger plane, which the Qatari emir gave him as a gift this past May, into the next variant of Air Force One. Installing all the communications and other high-tech gear will actually wind up costing closer to $1 billion, according to expert estimates, and probably won’t be finished until Trump is out of office—at which point he has suggested that the plane might be retired, in any case, and go on display at the Trump presidential library. Still, Trump is eager to get the conversion going—and to hell with air-defense missiles for Ukraine or health care for poor and middle-class Americans.

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