US President Donald Trump boards Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, May 1, 2025. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will request a $1 trillion national defense budget in fiscal 2026, but will only hit those record levels by including more than two thirds of the $150 billion in extra defense funds contained in Republican reconciliation megabill currently making its way through Congress.
The White House will seek $1.01 trillion in total national defense spending for FY26, it announced Friday morning as it released its “skinny budget,” a document that gives the toplines for different government offices but contains few details.
The request would increase defense funding by 13 percent compared to FY25 through both discretionary funds as well as “$113 million in mandatory funding” — a reference to the defense funds included in the GOP-led reconciliation bill.
With only discretionary spending taken into account, the Trump administration’s request would amount to a request of about $893 billion for defense — about the same level as the current fiscal year, and on par with Biden-era spending projections. But while reconciliation funds can be spent over a four year period, but it appears the administration plans to use the majority in FY26.
Some Republican defense hawks in Congress are already expressing disappointment for the plan, with Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker outright stating that the administration “is not requesting a trillion dollar budget. It is requesting a budget of $892.6 billion.”
“President Trump successfully campaigned on a Peace Through Strength agenda, but his advisers at the Office of Management and Budget were apparently not listening,” said Wicker, R-Miss.
“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,” he said. “The Big, Beautiful Reconciliation Bill was always meant to change fundamentally the direction of the Pentagon on programs like Golden Dome, border support, and unmanned capabilities – not to paper over OMB’s intent to shred to the bone our military capabilities and our support to service members.”
A senior administration official countered that boosting defense nondiscretionary funding could have compelled Democrats to seek parity for non-defense programs, and that reconciliation funds for defense were always meant to be used in this manner.
What’s In The ‘Skinny Budget?’
The White House said the FY26 budget would prioritize investments to “strengthen the safety, security, and sovereignty of the homeland; deter Chinese aggression in the Indo Pacific; and revitalize America’s defense industrial base.”
Specifically, it would include a down payment on the Golden Dome missile shield, investments in US shipyards and the shipbuilding industrial base to increase wages and modernize infrastructure, fund the Air Force’s F-47 sixth-generation fighter and support requirements for space systems and nuclear modernization, the White House said.
Roman Schweizer, an analyst with TD Cowen, said the outcome was “not as good as hoped” but “it’s not terrible and suggests defense will see an increase” if the reconciliation bill is successfully voted out of Congress.
“We would assume Senate Dems are not going to go along with the major cuts to non-defense so another full-year Continuing Resolution could actually be the outcome,” he wrote in a note to investors.
The FY26 budget release starts as Republicans on Capitol Hill hammer out a package of Trump-backed spending cuts and increases that it aims to pass using a process called reconciliation, which allows the GOP to bypass a Democratic filibuster despite only having a razor thin majority in the House and Senate.
Earlier this week, the House and Senate armed services committees revealed the $150 billion defense reconciliation bill, which included large increases in spending for priorities like shipbuilding, munitions and the Golden Dome missile shield to be doled out during President Donald Trump’s term. HASC passed the bill on Tuesday, sending it to the House Budget Committee to be combined with other committee’s reconciliation legislation.
Last month, President Donald Trump announced that the FY26 budget would be the first to hit the trillion dollar mark.
“We also essentially approved a budget, which is in the [vicinity], you’ll like to hear this, of a trillion dollars,” Trump said while meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“$1 trillion, and nobody’s seen anything like it. We have to build our military, and we’re very cost conscious, but the military is something that we have to build, and we have to be strong, because you got a lot of bad forces out there now,” he said. “So we’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military.”
National Defense Strategy Launched
Coinciding with the announcement of the budget, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth kickstarted the development of the National Defense Strategy.
A key document for directing the Pentagon’s missions and goals, the NDS will be led by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, who had a hand in the development of the first NDS during Trump’s first term.
“The NDS is the single most important document to ensure the Department is operating in accordance with the President’s and my intent,” Hegseth wrote in a memo distributed by the Pentagon. “In order to rapidly drive change toward an America First defense strategy, I have directed that a final draft of the NDS be provided to me no later than August 31 , 2025.”
