The Pentagon said Thursday that more than $5 billion is being budgeted in the upcoming year for the Trump administration’s military operation at the U.S. southern border — and that some unrelated military projects may need to be pushed aside.
But defense officials, who briefed the press on annual budget plans, said they are betting on a Trump agenda bill in Congress to backfill any money pulled from current military funds to pay for border operations. The services have paid for the deployment of thousands of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and to Los Angeles amid immigration raid protests by shifting funds meant for barracks and other operations.
The budget plans for fiscal 2026 were released — though with less detail than was typical of past Defense Department budgets — as President Donald Trump is pursuing mass deportations across the country and expanding the role of the military in immigration and border security, including surging troops to the Mexico border and creating new military zones there.
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Defense officials spoke to the press about the budget plans only on condition of anonymity. In the past, the Pentagon has rolled out its annual budgets with military and civilian officials speaking on the record.
“We did work with the services to discuss what projects might be deferred just for one year to enable us to reprogram that money and use it for the border and for other purposes as well,” a senior defense official said.
The Pentagon is assuming the military funding holes left by shifting money to immigration and border missions now will be filled by the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” — legislation still being debated in Congress that is designed to enact Trump’s agenda.
The proposed funding in that bill is intended “to backfill those projects that were pushed out a little bit to make room for those emerging national security needs,” the official said.
The Pentagon has already moved to gut $1 billion from the Army’s budget to maintain its facilities, including living quarters for junior troops that for years have suffered from dilapidated conditions.
The raiding of Army facilities money sparked bipartisan ire on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers asking Army officials during a June budget hearing about the effects on soldiers’ quality of life.
Gen. Randy George, the service’s top officer, noted that in triaging budget priorities, something had to give. “Obviously, redirecting has an impact — you have to make choices,” he said.
In his previous term, Trump diverted $1 billion from an account that covers bonuses and other pay for troops to fund 57 miles of border wall.
Meanwhile, roughly 10,000 U.S. troops, including Marines, have now surged to the southern border. That includes elements of the 4th Infantry Division equipped with Stryker armored vehicles — a deployment level that rivals, and in some cases exceeds, the number of American forces currently stationed in global combat zones.
While the U.S. military has maintained a border presence in various forms for decades, the latest ramp-up under Trump comes as the force is largely overstretched. During the previous administration, senior Pentagon leaders privately voiced concerns about the growing strain on units already juggling deployments across Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East.
In response to anti-immigration raid protests in California, the Trump administration has also deployed thousands of troops to LA. That new mission is being taken out of other existing accounts, too.
The estimated cost of the LA mission, which includes 4,000 federalized National Guard troops and 700 Marines, is $134 million, Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell, the Pentagon’s acting chief financial officer and comptroller, said at a congressional hearing earlier this month.
“The money will be pulled from the troops’ existing operations and maintenance accounts,” she said.
Defense officials said Thursday that the fiscal 2026 budget would offer junior troops at least $5 billion for barracks maintenance and construction, though they weren’t immediately able to offer details of what that money would be spent on.
A senior Navy official told reporters that the sea service planned on spending $4.2 billion on barracks maintenance and construction.
The Marine Corps is slated to receive $2.9 billion of that total as part of the service’s ambitious Barracks 2030 program, which has set out to improve unaccompanied housing for tens of thousands of Marines, to include civilian specialists to help manage the day-to-day workload.
Military.com reported in April that if that Capitol Hill did not appropriate enough funding for the Marine Corps’ roughly $11 billion total improvement effort, Barracks 2030 could get pushed into the 2040s, long after many junior Marines could reap its benefits.
Eric Mason, the unaccompanied housing team lead for the service’s installations arm, said then that “if, for some reason, God forbid, we don’t get all the money we’re asking for, then we have a backup plan, an alternate plan, which takes [us] out to about 2045, 2043, depending on how much we end up getting.”
A senior Army official said that service plans to spend $2.5 billion on barracks, including $411 million for barracks at Fort Wainwright in Alaska, Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and Fort Campbell in Kentucky.
An Air Force official said the service is asking for $2.5 billion with a focus on building child development centers at Eglin, Travis Air Force Base in California, and Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, as well as dormitories.
Specific details, such as why those funding amounts from each service add up to more than the announced $5 billion for barracks maintenance and construction, were not provided to Military.com.
Overall, Thursday’s budget rollout represented an unprecedented move in what few specific details were provided to justify the “asks” from all the services. The $5 billion for the border mission — and a notable amount of the Pentagon’s 2026 budget overall — is also tied to the success of the proposed Trump agenda bill, which is for now uncertain.
The White House has repeatedly advertised those funds as part of the Department of Defense’s budget request. While it’s being marketed as a $1 trillion budget, at least $113 billion is proposed in the unpassed reconciliation bill, meaning the amount is closer to around $848 billion — roughly the same amount spent in the current fiscal year.
Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., told Military.com that Thursday’s budget rollout is “the most disjointed and poorly executed budget release” he’d ever seen.
He described the administration’s justification for its priorities as “an absolute failure.”
“It’s not clear that there is any strategy behind the numbers or if they even know what the numbers really are,” Harrison told Military.com. “They seem to be relying on this mythical reconciliation bill that they didn’t request and is not yet finalized to fill in gaps that they created.”
And some services are actually seeing cuts in the new budget.
For example, in the Space Force, discretionary funding decreased from $29.4 billion to $26.3 billion. A White House official told Military.com that roughly $13.8 billion in related mandatory funding would actually make it an increase, but didn’t specify the source of all the totals.
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