Two big oddities infused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s testimony as he made the rounds on Capitol Hill this week to justify the Pentagon’s budget request to appropriators: first, the Defense Department has not publicly released its full fiscal year 2026 budget; and second, the numbers he cited require passage of the deeply controversial reconciliation bill.
Without it, the Pentagon’s budget would stay flat—despite the Trump administration’s touting of a $1 trillion national-security budget, itself a hedge from Hegseth’s comments in April previewing a trillion-dollar DOD budget.
“Reconciliation, Mr. Secretary, was meant to provide one-time supplemental funds to augment the defense budget, not to supplant the investments that should be in the base budget,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told Hegseth on Wednesday during a Senate appropriations defense subcommittee hearing.
Hegseth described a $961.6 billion defense-spending proposal for next year, but that number includes more than $100 billion in the reconciliation bill, an infusion the Pentagon is counting on to cover investments in shipbuilding and missile defense.
The proposed discretionary Defense Department budget is $831.5 billion, the same amount authorized for the current fiscal year, and therefore a slight decline in real terms.
“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 Wednesday’s hearing, adding that it falls short of even recent, historically low defense budgets as a share of the country’s 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.”
The one-time investment of a reconciliation bill should not replace steady growth, he added.
“The top line, in fact, may well end up functioning as a shell game to avoid making the most significant annual investments that we spent years urging the previous administration to make,” McConnell said.
Naval shipbuilding, a much ballyhooed priority for the administration, gets a meager infusion, with two new submarines and an ocean surveillance ship, while the reconciliation bill contains funding for another submarine and two new destroyers.
“We have judged the capabilities that we need,” Hegseth responded. “So when you look at the totality of the $961 billion … that’s 19 new ships. It’s a historic investment in shipbuilding. It’s over $6 billion in the shipbuilding defense industrial base.”
To get to those numbers, the department is stretching some dollars. On Tuesday, during a defense subcommittee meeting of the House Appropriations committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., pointed out that the Pentagon wants to spread $3.1 billion for the Columbia-class submarine over 2027 and 2028.
“This creates a serious problem for industry in the short term, and hampers shipbuilders’ ability to reach an adequate production rate,” DeLauro said.
Hegseth also provided few details about the administration’s request for Golden Dome funding: $25 billion in the reconciliation bill as a down-payment on a wildly ambitious missile-defense project that the administration has said will cost $175 billion and that experts have said would cost far more.
“Golden Dome at this point is merely a concept. It’s not a plan,” Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., said Tuesday. “None of us have been briefed yet on how you intend to spend $175 billion or deliver this program in three short years.”
Much of that money will be invested in systems that already exist, Hegseth said.
“We’ll need to ramp up the production of them, because the president has charged us with having this mission capable by the end of his term,” he said. “This is not something that’s futuristic. This is not something that will happen in some distant future based on some technology we don’t yet have or can’t feel.”
