President Donald Trump on Friday officially requested $1.5 trillion in spending for the Pentagon next fiscal year, which would be the largest defense budget in U.S. history.
Trump also outlined some $73 billion in cuts to nondefense federal spending, including small cuts to renewable energy programs and diversity and inclusion programs across agencies.
The request comes as Congress grapples with the ballooning costs of the war in Iran, a persistent shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security and the midterm elections ahead.
The White House’s 2027 fiscal year budget proposes a 42 percent increase in defense spending and asks Congress to approve another $350 billion for military weapons and an expansion of the “defense industrial base,” according to a summary of the request released Friday morning.
The request invests “in the foundations of American military power — from defense industrial capacity to the readiness and health of the force” and ensures the “United States maintains the world’s most powerful and capable military,” the administration wrote in documents from the White House Office of Management and Budget announcing the proposal. The full budget proposal is expected later Friday.
The summary also urged Congress to approve a 13 percent increase, or $40.8 billion total, focused on the Justice Department’s efforts to “bring violent criminals to justice” related to immigration, gangs and drug cartels.
The president’s budget request reflects the administration’s spending priorities, but Congress often settles on different spending priorities, especially as the majority party is forced to work with the minority party to pass legislation.
Last year, the administration proposed $163 billion in cuts that reflected some of the spending changes already implemented by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service. The cuts were aimed atchild care, education, climate assistance programs, and research and development and boosted spending for defense. But Congress largely rejected those cuts. Instead, they funded agencies the White House had sought to slash — such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health — similarly to previous years.
It marked one of the few times Republicans in Congress have worked with Democrats to resist the administration’s repeated efforts to assert control over federal spending in novel ways. Over the past year, the White House froze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, at times targeting projects in Democratic-led states; moved money around to backfill shortfalls during government shutdowns; and clawed back money appropriated by Congress without lawmakers’ approval — without widespread pushback from the members responsible for shaping federal spending.
The White House budget is distinct from other federal spending packages, such as the GOP tax and spending law passed last year, which extended tax cuts, enacted cuts to Medicaid, and is expected to add $4.7 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Republicans in Congress plan to pursue another party-line package this year through a process known as reconciliation to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection amid a record-breaking shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.
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