“President Trump successfully campaigned on a peace through strength agenda, but his advisers at the Office of Management and Budget were apparently not listening,” Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, 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.”
The White House proposal did not outline specifically how much of the budget was slated for the Pentagon. National defense spending proposals typically include the Pentagon’s funding requests as well as money requested by other national security agencies, including certain nuclear programs run by the Department of Energy.
OMB Director Russel Vought indicated the $1 trillion defense budget would include a separate funding package under consideration now in Congress that would provide the Pentagon about $150 billion to invest in shipbuilding, a layered missile defense shield and other defense priorities. Republicans are pushing that bill through Congress using the reconciliation process, which will allow them to bypass Democratic opposition and pass the legislation with a simple majority vote.
But Wicker and other Republicans blasted the Trump administration for including those funds in its $1 trillion proposal. Wicker said he would work to increase Pentagon spending for 2026 over the White House proposal.
“This budget would decrease President Trump’s military options and his negotiating leverage,” Wicker said in his statement. “We face an axis of aggressors led by the Chinese Communist Party, who have already started a trade war rather than negotiate in good faith. We need a real peace through strength agenda to ensure [China’s President] 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 House Armed Services Committee’s chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., also pledged to find ways to increase military spending over the skinny budget proposal. He wrote in a statement that he was concerned the U.S. defense industrial base could not handle the challenge of a prolonged conflict with a near-peer adversary after years of flat Pentagon budgets and a full-year continuing resolution for fiscal 2025.
“This all stems from chronic underinvestment in our national security, which is being driven by OMB bureaucrats,” Rogers said. “We are currently at the lowest level of defense spending as a percentage of GDP since before World War II. That is no longer sustainable in the threat environment we face.”
Other Republican senators also expressed concerns about the defense spending level, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who is the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
McConnell called the inclusion of the proposed supplemental funds in the White House budget “a gimmick.” Collins charged the budget proposal was late and lacking needed detail.
“Based on my initial review, however, I have serious objections to the proposed freeze in our defense funding given the security challenges we face,” she wrote. “... Ultimately, it is Congress that holds the power of the purse.”
The White House proposal also showed dramatic cuts to non-defense federal spending. Trump wants to cut non-defense spending by about $163 billion in fiscal 2026 with cuts to almost all the federal departments. The Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Defense would see slight funding increases under the proposal.
The skinny budget release indicates the Pentagon intends to provide a 3.8% boost to pay for service members, fund Trump’s proposed Golden Dome homeland missile defense program, increase spending on shipbuilding infrastructure and projects, continue efforts to modernize nuclear weapons programs, and move forward with the F-47 Next Generation Air Dominance program to build a sixth-generation fighter jet.
The budget information released does not indicate how much funding the Pentagon will propose for any of those or other individual projects.
It was not clear Friday when the White House would release its full fiscal 2026 budget proposal. Officials at the Pentagon deferred comment to the White House, which did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
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