The White House says it has proposed the first trillion-dollar defense budget, but some senators and budget analysts aren’t buying it.
“For Defense spending, the President proposes an increase of 13 percent to $1.01 trillion for FY 2026,” White House budget director Russell Vought wrote in a May 2 letter to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who leads the Senate Appropriations Committee.
But that topline relies on funding outside of the normal budget-request process. In the letter, Vought wrote that “a portion of these increases” would be provided under the reconciliation legislation that House legislators are working on. That means that the administration will need at least one extra piece of legislation to reach its defense-spending goal.
There are no details on the $1.01 trillion “defense spending” topline in Vought’s letter or in the supporting materials posted Friday to the White House website. Summary tables in the White House budget overview documents suggest that $893 billion—which matches fiscal 2025 funding—would come through the normal defense appropriations process, with an additional $113.3 billion in “mandatory funding” to DOD’s topline coming from the reconciliation legislation. And according to other White House documents, officials expect $119.3 billion in defense spending for 2026 to come from “Pending Reconciliation Resources Affecting Base Discretionary Funding.”
That’s not what Republicans wanted.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the disconnect between White House rhetoric on national security and its budget proposal “peculiar,” and the number-crunching a “gimmick.”
“It is peculiar how much time the President’s advisors spend talking about restoring peace through strength, given how apparently unwilling they’ve been to invest accordingly,” McConnell, who leads the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, said in a statement Friday. “Make no mistake: a one-time influx reconciliation spending is not a substitute for full-year appropriations. It’s a supplement. OMB accounting gimmicks may well convince administration officials and spokesmen that they’re doing enough to counter the growing, coordinated challenges we face from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and radical terrorists. But they won’t fool Congress.”
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said the request would “decrease President Trump’s military options and his negotiating leverage.”
“President [Donald] Trump successfully campaigned on a Peace Through Strength agenda, but his advisers at the Office of Management and Budget were apparently not listening,” Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Friday. We need a real Peace Through Strength agenda to ensure Xi Jinping does not launch a military war against us in Asia, beyond his existing military support to the Russians, the Iranians, Hamas, and the Houthis.”
Wicker also called the proposal “a fifth year straight of Biden administration funding, leaving military spending flat, which is a cut in real terms” that will “shred to the bone our military capabilities and our support to service members.”
Wicker’s counterpart in the House, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said defense spending as a percentage of GDP is too low.
“I am very concerned the requested base budget for defense does not reflect a realistic path to building the military capability we need to achieve President Trump’s Peace Through Strength agenda,” Rogers, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Friday. “I look forward to working with the president and the Senate to achieve real growth in the defense budget and put America on track to realize the President’s goal of investing 5 percent of GDP on defense for NATO countries.”
The White House responded to the criticisms by saying the funding method was requested by defense hawks in the U.S. Senate—and might take a little “explaining” to get other lawmakers to get on board.
“We think this is a more durable way to get to $1 trillion in defense spending,” a White House OMB official told reporters Friday. “You can put anything you want to in a budget and say, ‘This is what we need.’ But that doesn’t mean that it’s aligned with a strategy that will actually lead to execution. And so we do think it’s paradigm-shifting. We do think we have to explain it.”
The official said “disagreements” are expected between the White House and Congress on how the budget is allocated, but the key is to be “judicious” and have funding align with national security priorities.
“The American people are asking us to be very judicious with their taxpayer resources. Thirteen percent is a very, very healthy increase, and we want to make sure that it is going towards capabilities that DOD needs, says it wants, says are vital,” the official said. “And we’re happy to continue to explain that to the Hill. And I’m not surprised that we’ll have to do some work on that front. But again, this was a strategy that originated in some respects with defense hawks in the Senate.”
Banks and investors also took note, and were seemingly underwhelmed with the defense spending proposal.
“For defense, it is advertised as a 13 percent [year over year] increase from last year’s enacted.
There has been a debate whether there would be a discretionary or mandatory increase. Our view ($1 trillion + $150 billion) was too bullish and appears wrong,” TD Cowen analyst Roman Schweizer noted to investors Friday. “The budget would keep discretionary spending flat (~$848 billion [Department of Defense] base) and add $113.3 billion of the $150 billion in reconciliation.”
In his newsletter to subscribers, Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners hinted at some trepidation, saying “we’d treat the release with a bit of caution, because the $1.012 trillion…depends on Congress passing the reconciliation bill, which includes $119 billion for defense. We don’t know how the remaining $32 billion in reconciliation instructions would be distributed in [fiscal year 2027] and beyond.”
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