Let’s Not Do This Again
DIVERGENT DEFENSE SPENDING BILLS CREATE CAPITOL CONFUSION
BY SONIA TOLOCZO
This year’s defense funding process
and reconciliation’s role in it are only just starting to
come into full view. With the full Pentagon budget, the
One Big Beautiful Bill Act and each of the House’s and
Senate’s defense authorization and appropriations bills
finally in hand, we can begin to make sense of how all
these visions for defense spending clashed and combined
during the process of producing a FY26 budget.
Rehashing this budget season is an excellent way to be
reminded it should not be repeated. We’ll also review
the winding process that affected the procurement of a
standout of the surface fleet, the Arleigh Burke destroyer,
emblematic of the unique impact mandatory funding
and incomplete budget requests have had on naval
procurement. An early indication of the chaotic process to come was
the late release of the President’s Budget for fiscal
year 2026. By law, the President’s Budget should be
released between the first Monday in January and the
first Monday in February. However, in the past decade
or so, the White House has rarely released its full budget
request before March, especially during the first year of a
U.S. NAVY | MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 2ND CLASS JOSEPH MACKLIN
new president’s term. The Trump Administration didn’t
release the President’s “skinny budget” until May 2 and
then provided more details starting June 2, with most
being published on June 6. Congress ultimately waited
until June 26 to receive a complete itemized budget
request from the Pentagon.In recent years, Congress’ track record for passing
federal budgets before the end of the fiscal year has
been less than encouraging, and this delay further
increased the likelihood lawmakers would miss the
Sept. 30 deadline for funding the government. In
addition to shortening the House and Senate’s window
to pass government funding, the Pentagon’s delayed
budget request affected Congress’ budgetary plans in
a different way: it led the House and Senate to create
defense appropriations legislation based on significantly
different baseline funding estimates.
To understand how the House and Senate created their
defense legislation with different Department of Defense
toplines in mind, we first need to rewind to February.
Before legislators began working on the budget,
they agreed to a concurrent resolution establishing
spending levels for FY26. In this year’s concurrent
resolution, Republican leadership also elected to pursue
reconciliation legislation, which allows for the expedited
passage of a tax and spending bill. A reconciliation bill
can be passed by a simple majority of Senators and limits
the time during which lawmakers can debate. This allows
a party with a tight majority to pass funding legislation
that otherwise wouldn’t clear the 60-vote requirement
for Senate budget approval. Once both chambers agreed
to a concurrent resolution in April, observers predicted
FY26 appropriations would be further delayed as
lawmakers focused on passing reconciliation.
In choosing to pursue this legislative plan, Congress
took the first step on what would become a novel course
for defense appropriations. When mandatory defense
spending under reconciliation became a possibility, the
Trump Administration incorporated that funding in
budget plans, a maneuver that perplexed many observers
and members of Congress alike.
In the May 2 “skinny budget,” the administration offered
this explanation: “In combination with $113 billion
in mandatory funding, the budget increases defense
spending by 13%.” At the time, it was unclear whether
the DoD’s 13% budget increase included reconciliation
funding. At the end of May, Rep. Jodey Arrington
(R-Texas) introduced the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the
Republican-drafted reconciliation legislation, which
included $160 billion in mandatory defense spending.
Many lawmakers expected this would be a one-time
windfall for the DoD, helping jump-start shipbuilding
and support expanded Department of Homeland Security
operations.
As the Trump Administration released more details
about its budget recommendation, however, it became
clear President Trump was intending to achieve the $1
trillion defense budget to which he aspired by combining
reconciliation funding and annual budget appropriations.
This accounting tactic created a $1 trillion defense budget
in only the loosest possible semblance of the idea. In
practice, reconciliation funding is not governed by the
same timelines or clear allocation practices as a budget,
and the two are not comparable.
A week into June, with only three months until
government funding would run out, two months until
Congress’ August recess, limited details from the
Pentagon, and no certainty reconciliation would pass,
House authorizers elected to base their budget on the
WASHINGTON REPORT
As the Trump Administration released
more details about its budget
recommendation, however, it became
clear President Trump was intending to
achieve the $1 trillion defense budget
to which he aspired by combining
reconciliation funding and annual
budget appropriations.
White House’s discretionary defense spending request
and introduced an National Defense Authorization Act
with $882.9 billion in defense authorizations. Then on
June 16, Rep. Ken Calvert (R-California) introduced the
Department of Defense Appropriations Act for FY26
with a defense topline of $832 billion, about $10 billion
less than FY25 funding. Regarding the predicament the
delayed budget request caused, the authors of the House
report on the appropriations bill wrote:
“… The Committee’s effort to support [the President’s
Budget] was hampered by the lack of a full budget
proposal and detailed justification material. This lack
of information meant that the Committee was unable
to examine up-to-date program execution data, in the
context of a full fiscal year 2026 request. Nonetheless,
the Committee offers its recommendation on a timeline
to allow for on-time consideration and enactment.”
By the time the Pentagon’s complete budget request was
sent to Congress on June 26 — a month after Arrington
introduced the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — it wasn’t a
surprise to see reconciliation included alongside FY26
funding. Electing to include $156 billion in defense
spending from an unpassed reconciliation bill alongside
the $848.3 billion regular appropriations request was,
nonetheless, an unprecedented decision from the DoD. In
a Senate Appropriations hearing, Defense Secretary Pete
Hegseth described the Pentagon’s plan as “two bills and
one budget.” The Department of Defense did not release
a contingency plan for the case that reconciliation failed
in Congress. That scenario didn’t come to pass, however,
Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker speaks at a U.S. Senate Committee on
Armed Services hearing in Washington, D.C., Sept. 12, 2024.
as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act narrowly passed with a
vote of 218-214 on the Fourth of July.
Diverging on DDGs
With the Pentagon’s complete budget request and the
certainty of reconciliation funding in hand, the Senate
composed a defense appropriations bill based on a
wildly different expectation of the defense topline and
programmatic funding than the House. In mid-July, Sen.
Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) introduced the Senate
NDAA, with a top line of $879.3 billion, slightly below
the House NDAA’s at $882.9 billion. Two weeks later,
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) introduced the
Department of Defense Appropriations Act. This bill
would provide $852.4 billion, $20 billion higher than the
House’s appropriations legislation. As of late October,
the chambers of origin have each passed three out of four
of these bills, with the Senate defense appropriations
legislation being the odd one out. Although the final
figures for the NDAA and appropriations bills are
relatively similar, their contents are not. The difference
in defense baseline funding estimates between the two
chambers resulted in an anomalous discrepancy in DDG
funding between bills, which we can use to visualize the
effect of reconciliation on the House and Senate budgets.
When representatives introduced their NDAA and
defense appropriation bills, they couldn’t be certain
the billions intended to spur shipbuilding from the
reconciliation bill would make it out of Congress.
Therefore, the recommendation for shipbuilding
and conversion in the House appropriations bill was
$36.9 billion, closer to the FY25 budget of $39 billion.
The Senate, knowing that $29.2 billion of mandatory
spending for shipbuilding was passed in the One Big
Beautiful Bill Act, only recommended a budget of $29.3
billion. Using these figures, we can further examine the
differences between the House and Senate’s funding.
The reconciliation bill mandated $5.4 billion to buy two
DDGs. In the House appropriations bill, representatives
passed $5.1 billion for Arleigh Burke class destroyers,
well down from the $7.9 billion enacted in FY25. In
contrast, the Senate’s appropriations bill includes
only $460 million for DDG 51s and $1.3 billion for their
advanced procurement. The Arleigh Burke procurement
funding is off by an order of magnitude between the two
chambers.
Adding reconciliation funding to this year’s budgetary
equation left lawmakers in a difficult position for
conferencing their vastly different visions of the federal
budget. Several prominent legislators, especially from
Maine, Florida and Missouri, intended to finally pass an
adequate shipbuilding budget and get their shipyards
building Arleigh Burkes. Instead of achieving that goal
and passing a clean increase in funding upon which
to base next year’s budget, members of Congress will
have to decide whether reconciliation funding can really
replace what they would have appropriated.
One can only hope the effects of this experiment
in creative budget-building deter this and future
administrations from imperiling the nation’s defense
funding again. The lateness of the President’s Budget
and the decision to pursue reconciliation funding set off
a chain reaction that has not yet reached its conclusion.
Legislators must take care to remember their primary
responsibility is to ensure America’s workers, service
members and allies aren’t burned in the process.
Sonia Toloczko is legislative af fairs associate at the Navy League. Since graduating from Boston
College with a bachelor’s in Political Science and Slavic Studies in 2023, Sonia has worked in
legislative affairs on behalf of nonprofit organizations