Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NHNew Hampshire residents will pay roughly $6.23 billion of the Pentagon’s record FY2027 budget. That’s nearly three times our entire state General Fund. The state owes overdose families $0.
Correction, Sept. 22, 2026, 9:54 a.m. EDT: This article said RSA 21-M:8-h caps victims’ compensation at $30,000 per claimant per incident. The statute sets a $50,000 maximum. The article also said one year of New Hampshire’s Pentagon share would pay for twelve $600 million prisons and called that prison a half-billion-dollar facility. $6.23 billion covers about ten such prisons, and one month’s share, about $519 million, falls a little short of one. The article also stated flatly that overdose families have no eligibility, that the state contributes nothing of its own, and that families who ask the Department of Justice are told they are owed nothing. The statute does not mention overdose deaths, whether a particular family could qualify is a legal question, and the statute lets the attorney general request additional state funds to pay claims (RSA 21-M:8-h, XI); those passages now describe the statute as written. The passages have been corrected.
Six billion, two hundred twenty-five million dollars. That is what New Hampshire residents will contribute to the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion fiscal year 2027 budget request. Divide $1.5 trillion among the 341 million Americans the Census Bureau counted in mid-2025 and the per-capita federal Pentagon levy is about $4,400. Multiply against the 1,415,342 people the Census records as Granite Staters and you arrive at the bill: $6.23 billion. From this state. In a single fiscal year. To pay for the largest military budget in human history.
New Hampshire’s entire annual General Fund, which covers every non-trust-funded function of state government from corrections to courts to public safety, is about $2.107 billion. Our annual Pentagon share is nearly three times that. Combined with the Education Trust Fund, New Hampshire’s two largest funds total $3.15 billion a year. Our Pentagon share is roughly double that. The federal government taxes Granite Staters more than $6 billion a year for foreign warfare and returns none of it to spending inside this state.
The education contrast is worse. New Hampshire ranks dead last in the country, fiftieth of fifty, in the percentage of state funds appropriated to K–12 public schools as a share of total school revenue (per FY2022 New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute analysis, the most recent ranking available). The state’s annual “adequate education aid” disbursement runs around $1.1 billion. New Hampshire’s federal Pentagon contribution is 5.7 times the state’s entire contribution to its own public schools. We spend six times more bombing other countries than teaching our own kids.
Statutory Anchor
RSA 21-M:8-h — Victims’ Compensation Program
New Hampshire law authorizes the state to compensate persons who “sustain personal injury as a result of a felony or misdemeanor,” persons injured by drunk or drugged drivers, child sexual abuse victims, and human trafficking victims. Maximum recovery: $50,000 per claimant per incident.
Overdose deaths are not named in the statute. The law covers “personal injury as a result of a felony or misdemeanor” and lets the immediate family claim when a victim dies “as a direct result of the crime.” A self-administered drug poisoning does not fit that category on its face; whether a particular family could qualify is a legal question. Per the program’s own funding disclosure, “The costs of this program are paid by motor vehicle and criminal fine assessments and federal Victims Of Crime Act (VOCA) grants, and not by New Hampshire Taxpayers.” The statute does let the attorney general request additional funds to pay claims, with the approval of the legislature’s fiscal committee and the governor and council. The statute is silent on overdose deaths.
The New Hampshire Department of Corrections reports an average annual cost to incarcerate a single individual in the state prison system of $54,386. The men’s prison in Concord holds an operational capacity of 1,408. The state is planning to replace it at a projected cost of roughly $600 million, described by then-Governor Sununu in 2024 as potentially the largest capital project in state history. That entire $600 million facility is the equivalent of a little more than one month’s worth of New Hampshire residents’ annual Pentagon contribution.
With a little more than one month of what its residents send to the federal government for the military, New Hampshire could build a brand-new state prison. With one year, about ten such prisons. Or fully fund K–12 education at five times the current state rate, close every documented gap in the state’s mental health treatment infrastructure, and still have enough left over to pay every family of every New Hampshire fentanyl overdose victim a meaningful, statutorily defined benefit instead of the zero dollars the state currently provides.
This is not an abstract grievance. New Hampshire lost 276 residents to drug overdose in 2024 according to the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The number was the lowest since 2013 and still represents hundreds of households burying loved ones. Those surviving families pay property taxes here and federal taxes for the Pentagon. The federal government collects about $4,400 from each of them annually to bomb countries they could not locate on a map and could not name a single political figure inside of. The state of New Hampshire collects property taxes from them so the legislature can debate whether to build a $600 million prison to warehouse other people’s overdosing sons. Under RSA 21-M:8-h as written, a self-administered overdose is not listed as a “personal injury as a result of a felony or misdemeanor,” and the program makes no specific provision for those families.
What exactly are we paying for? The Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget buys more bombs, more bases, more contracts. The flag-draped coffins come included at no extra charge. New Hampshire’s $6.23 billion contribution to that total buys, for Granite Staters specifically, the right to be told there is no money for our schools, no money for our overdose families, no money for our broken mental health system. The money exists. It goes somewhere else, decided by people who do not know our names and will never visit our towns.
We are not poor. We are looted. And the people looting us are wearing American flag lapel pins while they do it.
$6.23 billion. For what, exactly?
Dexter Dow is the founder and editor of Granite State Report, an independent New Hampshire civic journalism publication based in Northfield. His ongoing reporting examines the state’s fiscal priorities, the New Hampshire corrections system, and the political economy of perpetual war.
Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.
