That's not weird is it? I'd expect a normal, peaceful society to have less need for soldiers than police agents, and portugal is approximately as large as NYC, and not as wealthy: makes sense their military is smaller than NYC's police. I'd expect it to be smaller than their police force too (no idea if that's true, though).
A quick google suggests 50k police officers and 33k soldiers - pretty unsurprising.
"This is bigger than that" or "this is smaller than that" are not particularly useful comparisons. I could use the same tactic to make the budget seem overblown.
The budget for the US federal judiciary is bigger than the GDP of 64 countries[1]
The point is pretty incoherent then, because they're proving that indeed it's reasonable for the federal judiciary to have a larger budget and thus not demonstrating that comparing budgets leads to absurdity.
That's not a convincing argument, because it's pretty reasonable for a several orders of magnituge wealthier country to outspend a smaller economy on all kinds of stuff (including their entire GDP).
California spends about $65/citizen.[1] $90/citizen seems to compare favorably to the U.K., at least in terms of outlays. It could also simply evidence that the U.S. judiciary is underfunded.
I'm assuming the Ministry of Justice figure is exclusive of prisons. If the figure includes prisons, which cost ~$85/citizen in the U.K.[2] then court system expenditures would be greater in the U.S. (~$90) than the U.K. (~$65).
Granted I don't know exactly what is within their remit, but $8B is a fuck-tonne of money.