Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker criticized Donald Trump‘s 2026 budget proposal, saying it didn’t provide enough to counter foreign threats.
Earlier Friday, the Trump administration unveiled its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, boosting defense spending by 13 percent to a total of just over $1 trillion.
Wicker called that insufficient.
“President Trump successfully campaigned on a Peace Through Strength agenda, but his advisers at the Office of Management and Budget were apparently not listening,” Wicker said in a statement.
“For the defense budget, OMB has requested a fifth year straight of Biden administration funding, leaving military spending flat, which is a cut in real terms,” he went on. “The Big, Beautiful Reconciliation Bill was always meant to change fundamentally the direction of the Pentagon on programs like Golden Dome, border support, and unmanned capabilities—not to paper over OMB’s intent to shred to the bone our military capabilities and our support to service members.”
Wicker pointed to an “Axis of Aggressors”—chief among them, China—who would benefit from the decreased “negotiating leverage” that Trump would hold through his proposed budget.
“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,” the Mississippi Republican urged.
When asked about Wicker’s criticism, Office of Management and Budget head Russ Vought called the 13 percent number a “very, very healthy increase,” per The Hill.
Wicker wasn’t the only Republican senator to make their concerns public.
Mitch McConnell similarly called the defense portion of the budget part of “OMB accounting gimmicks,” adding that they “won’t fool Congress.”
“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 in the national defense or in other critical instruments of national power,” he said in a statement.
.@SenMcConnell Statement on FY26 Budget Request Defense Topline pic.twitter.com/MMIe2BltIC
— Senator McConnell’s Press Office (@McConnellPress) May 2, 2025
Maine’s Susan Collins took issue with “the proposed freeze in our defense funding” as well.
The moderate senator also had “serious objections to… the proposed funding cuts to—and in some cases elimination of—programs like LIHEAP, TRIO, and those that support biomedical research,” she said, referring to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and several Education Department programs for low-income and otherwise disadvantaged students.
Also included in Trump’s budget are cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
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