The Pentagon rolled out its $848.3 billion fiscal year 2026 discretionary budget request on Thursday, a small real decline from last year’s enacted $831 billion budget—and only the largest chunk of the Trump administration’s plan to spend more than one trillion dollars on defense next year.
The balance would come through a one-time, $113-billion infusion from Congress via the reconciliation bill currently in the Senate. The defense budget plus the reconciliation bill would bring total funding for the Defense Department to $961 billion, with the rest going to , which would bring the total to $961 billion for the Pentagon, while the remainder would be allocated to the Energy Department for nuclear-defense activities.
“This historic defense budget prioritizes strengthening homeland security, deterring Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific, revitalizing the U.S. defense industrial base, and maintaining our commitment to being good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” a senior defense official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told reporters Thursday.
The announcement was a stark departure from past budget roll-outs, which have traditionally included an overview briefing by the Pentagon’s comptroller, and sometimes the deputy defense secretary and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, followed by separate briefings by each military department.
The Pentagon has also posted limited documentation online with links to budget summaries accompanied by “(Coming Soon!)” in red print. As of press time, only the Navy department had posted its budget documents.
“The president’s budget for FY ‘26 includes $25 billion for Golden Dome, comprehensive Missile Defense Initiative. It’s to address the most catastrophic threats facing the United States, including ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles and other advanced aerial attacks,” a senior military official told reporters.
That doesn’t appear to be true. The Golden Dome down-payment, as it’s been referred to, is part of the reconciliation bill, not the budget request.
Available budget documents include what the department expects to receive in the reconciliation bill, which in some cases fills in proposed cuts to the budget in its totals.
Air Force operations and maintenance funding, for example, would drop by $1.3 billion in the budget, but with a $4.3-billion boost from reconciliation, would increase by $3 billion.
The budget proposal would boost overall procurement by just $300 million over last year, relying on $7.3 billion from reconciliation to fund major acquisitions.
This math has been widely criticized by lawmakers on the Capitol Hill, both by those who decide how much funding DOD receives and those who decide how they will spend it.
“But say we do take reconciliation into account, even then, this is hardly the largest funding request for the Department of Defense in constant dollars,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing this month, adding that it’s one of the lowest DOD budgets in recent history as a share of gross domestic product.
“Even including reconciliation, the fiscal year ’26 request is still just around 3 percent – that’s just half the level of the Reagan buildup that secured ‘peace through strength,’ “ McConnell said. “It’s even less than the 4.5 percent of GDP requested for defense under President Carter.”
While, with reconciliation, the defense’s overall proposed funding includes new ships and new tech for Golden Dome, there are big cuts on the way and under discussion.
The E-7 Wedgetail radar plane is done for, the senior defense official confirmed, “due to significant delays with cost increases from $588 million to $724 million per aircraft and survivability concerns in this contested environment.”
With the administration all in on the Air Force’s sixth-generation strike fighter, dubbed F-47, the budget calls to drop the next buy of F-35s from 74 to 47.
The official also left the future of the Navy’s next-generation strike fighter, F/A-XX, up in the air amid concerns that the industrial base can’t build both a new Navy fighter and Air Force fighter at the same time.
“Waiting for a decision from the secretary of the Navy, secretary of defense, and the president,” the official said. “That’s an active conversation, whether to continue with the program or not.”
The program will proceed with “minimal funding” for design, the official said. Asked whether the F-47 might end up as F-35 did—one procurement program with different variants to suit the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps—the official didn’t rule it out.
“I would say pretty much everything is under consideration to get the [tactical] air capability that our war fighters need as quickly as possible, and that’s really what we’re looking at the most, is the schedule of all these programs,” the official said.
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