DoD releases FY 2019 Defense Spending by State report

Each year more than half of the discretionary portion of the federal budget is spent by the Department of Defense (DOD). In FY 2019, the DOD figure is estimated to be $712.5 billion and 77 percent of it was spent in the 50 states and District of Columbus, based on a new report from the Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation (OLDCC) — formerly the Office of Economic Adjustment. The report outlines those DoD personnel and contractual expenditures in each state for the year. The nature and importance of defense spending varies widely by state, as the following SSTI chart and the original DOD report reveal.

Awareness of the composition and relative share defense spending plays in a state’s economy should be  inputs in policy determinations on how best to support the defense investment and to maximize its contributions toward future state growth. Aggregate research and development expenditures, for instance, only has a significant share of total defense spending in a handful of states. Policy makers may wish to exploit these established relationships with programs intended to grow the share even larger.

The report divides defense expenditures within states into four broad categories:  Construction, R&D, services, and supplies and equipment. As seen in the SSTI chart below, supplies and equipment makes up a majority of DoD spending in most states, while the service category accounts for the majority of DoD spending in all other states. Construction and research & development also account for sizeable portions of the defense spending in several states. The numbers next to each state name is total DoD contract and personnel spending as a percent of each state’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Click here to access the full report.