At its face, this big bill is about money, its input and output at the federal level. These amounts are described in the “millions” and “billions” and “trillions” of dollars, any of which are boggling to me as I try to compute it all for myself. A large grant to a university might total a million dollars; a thousand of these would cost a billion dollars; and a thousand billion dollars makes a trillion. Impartial analyses of the effects of the budgetary changes show an increase to our national debt totaling over $3 trillion over the next decade.

While I can’t really comprehend this kind of money, I understand better what it affords us. One of the large expenses is our military and defense systems, which approach a trillion dollars annually and have been given an increase of hundreds of billions of dollars projected over the next 10 years. There are some clear needs for this that I’m particularly attuned to, especially funds supporting our military families.

Personally, my very existence is beholden to the Air Force. My parents each arrived at a base in Arizona where they met and courted, and their relationship endured even while my dad was in Vietnam and my mom was stationed in Okinawa. I was born in an Air Force hospital in Massachusetts, documented by the hospital receipt affixed in the pages of my baby book revealing that I cost my parents $7.25. Mom says the price was fair.

This is all to say that it’s easy for me to see the value of defense spending, the people in that system as well as the systems they support, from the F-35 fighter jets departing from our local Hill Air Force Base to the massive vessels afloat around the globe. These all defend our country.

I genuinely wonder, though: What are we defending?

Certainly there’s us, the people, our lives and our livelihoods, our property and our prosperity. I think that we should all agree that humans deserve the freedoms envisioned by signers of our Declaration of Independence almost 250 years ago. We wave flags in proclamation of this.

But we also are a country of ideas and ideals. We fund a military to protect the existence of these. We maintain and celebrate values and cultures. As a nation, we define and defend borders so that within these we can enable individuals and the collective.

To that end, we take care of our well-being. In the most powerful country in the world, health and nutrition isn’t simply a fringe benefit, but a necessary part of existing. We typically and historically have chosen to sustain ourselves and others. Scientific research in health and science are fundamental to that pursuit and our values. And education is the bedrock underlying all prosperity and agency in our people.

Yet we don’t always enact such values. The same congressional act that has increased our defense spending has slashed hundreds of billions of funds for health and nutrition. Our president’s administration has, likely illegally, frozen the distribution of legislated funds from the Department of Education for teachers and students across the country. The proposed budgets of our National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health are now fractions of what they have traditionally been. Recently, staffers at the NSF were told that they would be evicted from their building.

These and so many other critical decisions are made by us, either directly or via our electorally designated representatives. These aren’t easy choices. It’s natural to think about ourselves first, in the most immediate moment and surroundings. But we also have the capacity to think broadly and into the future, compassionately and ethically about how we are all sharing the space and humanity of this nation.

Reasonable people could have different ideas about how we fund healthcare, education, science and so much else, including our defense. Reasonable people should also have a clear sense of what they’re defending. Is it borders? People? Yes, but we’re also composed of the values and ideals within, things that I think are eroding on our watch. We have a worthy defense. We should work harder to assure we also have a country worth defending.

Adam Johnston is a professor of physics and director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at Weber State University, where he helps prepare future teachers and supports educators throughout Utah. This commentary is provided through a partnership with Weber State. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent the institutional values or positions of the university.