US national defense is headed for a summer of discontent in Congress: President Donald Trump’s Pentagon budget request of $1.5 trillion for fiscal year 2027 is on the verge of unraveling.
The House and Senate Armed Services Committees are working on the annual defense authorization bill, but they can’t authorize more than $1.15 trillion in discretionary spending for defense. The remaining $350 billion is mandatory and can only be done through the reconciliation, party-line process.
GOP appropriators are raising the alarm that they don’t see a third party-line budget package happening this summer to the dismay of the House and Senate Armed Services chairs. Without the the additional defense dollars, Congress and the Pentagon will run into accounting issues on some key programs such as munitions, drones, and satellites because the administration crammed some top priorities into the mandatory, partisan-process request.
“I don’t agree with them,” Rep.
“I have great respect for their point of view. It’s possible that circumstances may alter those points of view,” said Sen.
Party Complications
Matters are becoming more complicated for defense spending this year, in large part because Senate Democrats and Republicans can’t find consensus on spending bills. The Democrats decry the unprecedented Pentagon boost that would be coming at the expense of other domestic and social programs.
“It’s evident that Democrats don’t want to have a regular budget process this year,” Sen.
The House is going ahead with the defense spending markup with Republicans proposing $1.07 trillion for fiscal year 2027. The tight margins in the GOP-led House make it so leaders need Democratic votes to pass legislation.
“The majority has written a Defense Appropriations Act that provides the department with over a trillion dollars—an unprecedented sum,” Defense Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member Rep.
Policy Fights
The House Armed Services Committee approved its $1.15 trillion defense authorization last week but Rogers said that House floor consideration hasn’t yet been scheduled. The Senate Armed Services Committee is in the process of writing the bill with the hopes to finish Wednesday.
If and once the bills come to the floor, they’ll surely have hundreds of amendments and stir up some controversial issues. Among them would be the new moniker of “Department of War” that the House armed services panel approved and the Senate panel is likely to back as well as Wicker indicated earlier this week.
Tempers also could rise over the renaming of military bases after Confederate generals. Democrats and some Republicans are trying to block the Pentagon from renaming bases that have already received new non-Confederate names after people who had similar names to those Confederate generals, such as Fort Bragg and Fort Lee.
Lawmakers in both parties are also alarmed by the spate of officer firings—most recently Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George—by defense chief Pete Hegseth. That issue is likely to resurface as the defense bills make their way through the congressional process. The House Armed Services Committee included a new requirement that would mandate a report “that describes the performance concerns, actions, or inactions of that officer that are cause for such removal, transfer, or relief of duty.”
The Pentagon also is risking a funding crisis this summer because of its operations in Iran and earlier in Venezuela. The Trump administration has yet to request a supplemental spending bill to cover the operations. Rogers told reporters this week that he expects the White House to put a number on that request shortly.