Or NYPD has more cops than Portugal has soldiers.

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

You neglect to mention that most of those countries are islands with a couple tens of thousands of residents.

The population of NYC may well be 5x higher than the combined populations of all of those countries.

That is exactly their point.

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).

Do you have a better example?