Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., raises his right hand during his ceremonial swearing-in with Vice President Kamala Harris inside the Old Senate Chamber in the U.S. Capitol on Friday, January 3, 2025. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee has two goals as he takes the gavel in 2025: boost defense funding by about $200 billion in the Republican’s reconciliation package and pass a sweeping acquisition reform proposal in the next defense policy bill, he told Breaking Defense in an exclusive interview.
If successful in getting a plus-up for defense, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., suggested the money could be used to help fund an Iron Dome-like missile shield over the United States — one of President Donald Trump’s stated defense priorities — as well as to make key investments in areas such as shipbuilding, submarines and the Air Force’s next-generation fighter.
“I hope and believe that President Trump’s pledge to restore peace through strength so that we can avoid conflict is going to be followed through with adequate funding,” Wicker said in a Jan. 23 interview. “At the same time, it is a magnificent opportunity to make the Defense Department and defense procurement more efficient and modern.”
Wicker’s office confirmed to Breaking Defense that the SASC chairman is pursuing a parallel strategy to enact his two priorities. The first goal is getting buy-in from Trump and GOP leadership on a substantial funding increase for defense in the reconciliation bill currently under negotiation. The second involves using the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act as a vehicle to pass Wicker’s acquisition reform vision, laid out in December as the Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense (FORGED) Act.
The budget reconciliation bill, which uses a special procedure that allows bills to avoid filibuster and pass with a simple majority, could include funding for Trump priorities like tax cuts and border security and is targeted to go to the president’s desk in April. (House Republicans are expected to discuss the reconciliation bill during their annual meeting in Miami early this week.)
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Wicker — who has argued that US defense spending should grow to 5 percent of GDP — and House Armed Services Committee chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., are hoping to make the case to GOP leadership that additional money for defense should be included as part of the legislation.
“It would not be outside the realm of possibility to make it $100 billion a year [for defense] for the next two years,” Wicker said. “That would start to get us where we want to go.”
A plus-up of that size — over a 10 percent increase from what Wicker’s committee marked up for the FY25 NDAA — could be used to accelerate the construction of warships, amphibious ships and submarines, he said, as well as to start development of an American Iron Dome missile defense shield, an investment that Wicker acknowledged will be a technical challenge as well as a costly expenditure.
“Israel is a small state about the size of New Jersey, so Iron Dome for Israel is much different from Iron Dome for America,” Wicker said. “But a missile defense shield with a large satellite, a space-based component, that’s going to be expensive, but it’s a must, and it happens that the president feels some urgency in getting that done.”
It could also help fund continued development of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, which faces an uncertain future due to budget constraints as the service balances other expensive modernization projects such as the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile system and the B-21 Raider bomber. As Breaking Defense first reported, the service recently concluded a study that validated the requirement for a manned sixth-gen fighter, but has left the incoming Trump administration to make the final decision on whether to continue or cancel the program.
In 2024, “we agreed reluctantly to do a bit of a pause to let the experts take another look at whether NGAD should be manned. And the answer came back after the election with the vengeance, absolutely yes,” Wicker said.
Boosting ‘the Elon Musks of the Future’
Wicker’s defense acquisition plan largely sailed under the radar when it was released in late December, as Congress was racing to pass a last-minute government funding extension. But if enacted, it could radically reshape the Pentagon’s contracting apparatus by injecting new policies meant to ramp up competition, make the acquisition process more agile and responsive to changes in threat, and untether nontraditional defense firms and commercial companies from some of the most onerous Pentagon contracting procedures.
“I haven’t gotten a lot of pushback from the big guys. The folks that would like to innovate and participate as startups are wild about it,” Wicker said. “I think [the primes] would agree that there are too many steps along the way that could be eliminated. But then the little guys — the guys with a new idea, the Elon Musks of the future — see this valley of death, and it’s real to them.”
One of the FORGED Act’s biggest shifts would make commercial procurement processes the default contracting method for the Pentagon, making defense-specific contracting procedures used by bespoke weapon systems like fighter jets and aircraft carriers the exception rather than the rule. The hope is to make it easier for companies that manufacture consumer products to do business with the Pentagon without having to go through the onerous process of proving they meet government standards for commercial goods.
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In a potentially even more radical change, the bill proposes making all nontraditional defense firms subject to commercial procurement rules, even if they are selling defense-specific products like missiles or drones. Because nontraditional defense firms have largely funneled their own research and development dollars into bringing a product to the market, unlike most defense products that are developed primarily with government funding, the report accompanying the FORGED Act argues that nontraditional companies should be exempt from rules that would force them to “stand up federal units with separate infrastructure” — a cost burden that might prevent them from continuing to invest their own capital into R&D in the future.
The legislation would also require the Pentagon to transition from a structure where program executive officers manage a given weapons program, into one where a “portfolio acquisition executive” or PAE has oversight over a group of related capabilities and can make tradeoffs among those weapon systems as funding, requirements and schedule evolves.
Under that construct, the services would push some of their requirements and programming staff into the PAE offices, as well as designating representatives from the operational community who would offer insight from the perspective of the troops would use the new weapon in the field.
In what could be another controversial move, it directs the Chairman of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) and Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) to co-chair a Joint Requirements & Programming Board, which would “provide analysis, set agendas, and lead debate” on defense acquisition policy measures but be purely advisory in nature, according to the report. The legislation would strip the JROC of its responsibility to validate joint requirements, with the organization instead tasked with “reviewing” requirements.
So far, industry organizations have yet to weigh in on the specifics of Wicker’s plan. In December, Aerospace Industries Association President Eric Fanning said the organization was reviewing the proposal and looked forward to working with Wicker moving forward.
“As the voice of the American aerospace and defense industry, we welcome Senator Wicker’s continued focus on strengthening the defense industrial base and reforming defense acquisition,” Fanning said then. “Senator Wicker’s proposal, along with the Department of Government Efficiency, offers a real opportunity to unleash innovation and get new weapons and equipment to the warfighter faster.”
While Wicker’s office is still early in the process of determining the legislative strategy for the reform proposal, senate aides said some of the FORGED Act will likely appear in the Wicker’s chairman’s mark of the FY26 NDAA, while more contentious changes will have to be dealt with in the committee’s markup process, where they will be offered as amendments to the policy bill and voted on after debate.
“This is not a Wicker-only effort,” one GOP aide said, adding that both Republicans and Democrats have historically been invested in acquisition reform. “So ideally, we are going to have a full team effort on the committee here.”
