For decades, the framing of U.S. military transfers to Israel as “arms sales” has obscured a critical, underreported reality: the vast majority of these transactions are not paid for by the Israeli government, but by American taxpayers. This hidden subsidy is now at the center of a growing congressional pushback, led by progressive lawmakers who are demanding an end to U.S. public funding for what they describe as destructive Israeli military operations.
Earlier this year, four U.S. senators — Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Democrats Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Peter Welch of Vermont — introduced joint resolutions of disapproval to block a $659 million shipment of 22,000 bombs to Israel, a transfer originally approved by the Trump administration. What makes this deal particularly contentious, the lawmakers argue, is that many of the weapons are being drawn directly from active U.S. military stockpiles, and the entire cost will be covered by U.S. taxpayers.
In a public statement announcing the resolutions, Sanders emphasized that in the wake of widespread destruction caused by Israel’s far-right government under Benjamin Netanyahu across Gaza, Lebanon, and regional flashpoints like Iran, providing tens of thousands of new munitions is the last priority American taxpayers should be forced to fund. Van Hollen echoed this position, noting that Congress must use every legislative tool at its disposal to halt what the caucus frames as Trump’s escalation of regional conflict, starting with cutting off taxpayer-funded weapons transfers to the Netanyahu administration.
Policy analyst Stephen Semler, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, recently published an in-depth data investigation that confirms the broad scope of taxpayer funding for U.S. arms transfers to Israel. As Semler explains, the label of “arms sale” is misleading by design. While Israel is officially listed as the purchaser in formal government notifications, the funding source is almost exclusively the U.S. Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program — an annual U.S. military aid package that provides Israel with at least $3.3 billion in public U.S. funds each year, which functions essentially as a taxpayer-funded “gift card” for Israeli weapons purchases.
Semler illustrated this dynamic by examining the four most recent publicly notified arms sales to Israel, published in the Federal Register: a $740 million deal for armored personnel carriers, a $1.98 billion contract for tactical vehicles and accessories, a $3.8 billion transfer for attack helicopters and related weaponry, and a $150 million deal for utility helicopters and replacement parts. In every single listing, the “funding source” field is marked as Foreign Military Financing, meaning U.S. taxpayer money covers the cost. Only one deal included a minor contribution from Israeli national funds, making the overwhelming majority of the $6.7 billion in tested transactions fully U.S.-funded. The 22,000-bomb shipment targeted by the Senate resolutions? Both components of that deal are 100% FMF-funded.
Expanding this analysis to cover the full four-year term of the Biden administration from 2021 to 2024, Semler compiled and cross-checked data from two official U.S. defense sources: the Defense Security Cooperation Agency’s (DSCA) Historical Sales Books for government-brokered Foreign Military Sales, and the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls’ (DDTC) Section 655 Reports for private commercial Direct Commercial Sales. The findings are stark: the Biden administration authorized a total of $22 billion in arms sales to Israel over that period, split between more than $13.2 billion in government-brokered deals and over $8.7 billion in commercial transactions.
DSCA data shows 90% of government-brokered sales are covered by U.S. military aid, and while DDTC does not publicly disclose funding sources for commercial sales, Semler’s estimate based on Israel’s historic average of FMF spending on commercial arms puts that share at 68%. All combined, Semler calculates that U.S. taxpayers covered $17.8 billion of the $22 billion in total Biden-era arms sales to Israel — 81% of the total value, or nearly $18 billion in taxpayer subsidies that have been misrepresented as commercial sales.
This reality undermines the most common policy justifications for continuing large-scale arms transfers to Israel. Proponents of the deals often argue they boost U.S. economic activity and create domestic jobs, but the fact that American taxpayers foot the bill eliminates any claim that the transfers bring meaningful foreign investment into the U.S. economy. Even the job creation argument falls apart under scrutiny: military spending is widely recognized as one of the least efficient ways for the U.S. government to generate new employment.
Historical data backs this up: in 1985, the U.S. military budget stood at $295 billion, equal to $746 billion in 2024 inflation-adjusted dollars, and the U.S. arms industry employed 3 million American workers. By 2021, the inflation-adjusted military budget had grown by $132 billion to $879 billion — an 18% real increase — but arms industry employment plummeted to just 1.1 million workers, a 63% drop in jobs despite massively increased public spending. The reliance on a job creation argument also tacitly reveals the weakness of national security justifications, Semmer argues: a policy that truly served core U.S. national security interests would not need to be defended on the grounds of job growth alone.
As the Senate prepares to consider the resolutions to block the Trump-approved bomb shipment, the analysis makes clear that the debate is not just about Israel’s military actions in the Middle East — it is about the growing burden of U.S. taxpayer funding for foreign military operations. Semler concludes that American taxpayers are owed a refund for decades of hidden subsidies, rather than being asked to cover billions more in weapons costs under new and existing administrations.