The United States spends a lot of money on defense. This is not an astounding fact. Just last month the president of the United States signed the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2015, giving the Department of Defense a base budget of $496 billion, plus $64 billion for what is referred to as Overseas Contingency Operations spending. This is because despite having a budget of nearly half a trillion dollars, the DoD base budget only covers normal operations and not combat spending. Also in the NDAA is $17.9 billion for the Department of Energy to spend on our nuclear weapons programs. If you didn't know, our nuclear weapons, though deployed on Navy submarines and housed in Air Force silos, are actually paid for by the Energy department.