WASHINGTON —The House Armed Services Committee has unveiled its $1.15 trillion defense policy bill for fiscal 2027, with lawmakers putting their legislative muscle into boosting weapons production for critical munitions, fighter jets and warships.
The bill authorizes the amount requested in the president’s FY27 discretionary request but does not factor in the $350 billion in the Pentagon’s mandatory funding request, which would bring national security spending to $1.5 trillion in FY27. Whether the department gets that funding will depend on if Republicans can muster the political willpower to push through another reconciliation bill — a tall order as GOP lawmakers are still working to pass a separate reconciliation bill centered around immigration enforcement.
HASC will debate amendments and mark up the bill on June 4 in what is typically a marathon session that stretches late into the night.
Rather than big changes to the annual funding levels for weapons programs, HASC Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., focused on the long-term expansion of the defense industrial base.
“We no longer have the capacity to build the capability for the war fighter at scale and speed. In some cases, manufacturing capacity just doesn’t exist,” said a senior majority committee staffer, who spoke to reporters on background.
The bill includes multiyear authority for the department to procure certain critical munitions, which would allow the Pentagon to solidify framework agreements with contractors that it has announced throughout this year. The 13 munitions include Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, THAAD interceptors, AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, Tomahawk cruise missiles and several Standard Missile variants, among others.
It also includes multiyear procurement authority for the F-15EX, F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and oilers.
The draft NDAA incorporates legislative provisions meant to shore up solid rocket motor manufacturing, which has historically been a fragile element of the munitions supply chain. The bill would establish a solid rocket motor qualification working group and would require that certain munitions have more than one solid rocket motor supplier.
While HASC remains supportive of the Pentagon’s efforts to boost SRM production, the committee softly criticized Pentagon’s plan to take a $1 billion direct equity investment in L3Harris’s missile solutions spin off, stating in the chairman’s mark that there are “other tools that could be used in a more expeditious manner given the importance of increasing munition production.”
During the background briefing, the staffer said the L3Harris deal was the first deal in which the Pentagon made a direct investment in a space where there are already new entrants trying to stand up production.
“The concern among some members was if the department comes in and puts their finger on the scale for L3, in this case, what does that mean for these startups who are trying to go to the same capital market and raise funds for their production initiatives?” the staffer said.
Lawmakers also want to know more about the munitions planned to be used as part of the Golden Dome missile shield, one of the administration’s highest priority programs. If passed, the bill would call on the Pentagon to submit “an alternative plan with respect to procuring munitions” for Golden Dome. Specifically, the report should lay out the munitions and procurement quantities needed by 2028, production plans for the munitions, and information about the feasibility of alternative munitions for air and missile defense.
Elsewhere in the bill, as the US considers troop reductions in Europe, HASC lawmakers included some provisions in the draft NDAA that would pose roadblocks, but not completely clamp down on the Trump administration.
It would extend funding restrictions in the FY26 NDAA that would kick in should the number of troops deployed to US European Command go below a 76,000 person threshold, but further action by lawmakers is likely.
“I think you’ll see some amendments on that as we move into markup,” the majority staffer said. “A lot of members feel very strongly about European force posture.”
The bill also would require several reports concerning force structure changes in Europe. The first would force the Pentagon’s policy chief to submit a report on “the analytical basis for the review of global force posture conducted during development of the National Defense Strategy, including the extent to which that analysis informed the force posture adjustments” in Europe.
The second report, signed off by the EUCOM commander, would revolve around NATO defense planning and burden sharing, with specific attention paid to NATO’s posture on the eastern flank.
The draft NDAA does not contain any funding specifically earmarked for Ukraine, but the staffer stated that HASC members remain broadly supportive of Ukraine and that amendments related to Ukraine could come up during next week’s markup.
Doubling Down On The Defense Industrial Base
Authorizers are doubling down on the FY26 NDAA’s focus on acquisition reform, with the FY27 bill centered on revitalizing the defense industrial base.
“We tilled the soil last year by trying to improve acquisition processes to make it more commercial, so that it’s easier for industry to work with the government,” Rogers told Breaking Defense in a February interview. “That was on purpose, because we do have to expand the defense industrial base. It’s gotten very small, and it’s atrophied, and it needs a lot of attention.”
At the time, Rogers said the committee had already started interviewing tech firms about what legislative actions could be taken to incentivize more work in the defense sector, as well as asking defense primes what they need to expand.
Some of the fruits of those efforts include language in the NDAA that would expand the use of Defense Industrial Base Fund for private-sector drydock and ship repair infrastructure. It also adds workforce development initiatives for domestic critical minerals production.
Other language would prevent the Pentagon from reducing or suspending progress payments to companies unless it meets certain criteria, as well as force the Pentagon to adjust current inflation thresholds every three years instead of every five years.
As the Pentagon expands the defense industrial base, HASC also wants to make sure that the department ensures that adversaries like China aren’t providing backdoor funding to new defense firms. The bill requires the Pentagon to stand up an office in the Office of Industrial Base Policy that would be responsible for reviewing and mitigating the risk of adversary capital inside the defense industrial base.
It also would mandate a new Economic Security Risk Assurance tool, which would provide risk analysis and data visualization for department officials.
More C-130s And Helicopters, Questions For Battleship Program
While the HASC bill provides the first look on how Congress will approach the FY27 defense budget, the NDAA only provides spending recommendations, with appropriators having the final say on funding decisions. That said, the bills are filled with legislative provisions that have major implications for major weapons programs.
The draft legislation includes a section that would bar the Navy from entering a contract or other agreement that “includes a scope of work for the construction” of the first Trump-class battleship until the secretary of the Navy certifies to lawmakers that the weapons systems the Navy wants to include on the lead ship are “at a sufficiently mature technology readiness level.”
Meanwhile, multiple lawmakers have questioned the value of the battleship, particularly given the steep cost associated with the vessel. The Navy is requesting approximately $1 billion in advance procurement and roughly $837 million in research and development funds for the battleship in fiscal year 2027, and is planning to request roughly $17 billion in procurement funding for the first ship in FY28, budget documents released in April show.
“That’s just an amount of money that really defies logic in terms of the fact that we just do not have anything close to design,” Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said during a House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee hearing last week.
After the president’s budget request drastically cut procurement funding for the Army’s rotary wing aircraft, HASC authorized an additional $250 million for six additional UH-60M Black Hawks and $381 million for seven CH-47 Chinooks. Previously, the president’s request allocated funds for one UH-60 M helicopter and five CH-47s. If the committee’s authorizations are implemented, the Army will procure seven UH-60Ms and 12 CH-47s.
The committee also proposed an addition of $176 million to the Paladin program after the president’s budget requested $84 million for the program. If implemented, the program will receive $260 million. This comes after Army senior leaders asked lawmakers to back the service in halting production of the howitzers.
In terms of proposed eliminations, the committee didn’t seek to cut much funding from the Army, but it did propose eliminating $70 million for the service’s Indirect Fire Protection Capability Inc 2 capability due to “unjustified growth.” It also proposed cutting the $127 million for the service’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), also known as the MV-75, from procurement and adding it back into research, development testing and evaluation funding. This would up the total RDT&E funding for FLRAA from $2.14 billion to $2.27 billion.
The bill also includes language directing the secretary of the Army provide annual updates to all congressional defense committees detailing its major initiatives such as continuous transformation, the Army Transformation Initiative and Transformation in Contact. The reports must include an “inventory of divestments” dating back to fiscal year 2023, which detail the timeline of the divestment, the rationale for divestments, and plans to make up for the losses of capabilities or capacities if the divestments affect the service’s ability to meet Global Force Management requirements.
In the realm of space, the chairman’s mark would eliminate both the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office (Space RCO), both of which were established by Congress as semi-independent direct reporting units with special acquisition authorities.
The fate of SDA and Space RCO has been in question since the Department of the Air Force began setting up new mission-centric Portfolio Acquisition Executive offices to streamline processes. SDA in particular has been in the hot seat due to a series of negative reviews about the performance of its data relay and missile tracking satellites in low Earth orbit.
The HASC bill would also see the creation of a DoD czar, reporting to the deputy defense secretary, to oversee acquisition and management of positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) programs across the services, including new efforts aimed at fielding alternatives to the GPS satellites. That official would be required to annually certify to Congress that all service PNT user equipment and ground system programs are fully funded in the DoD budget request — something that has been a huge problem in the past for GPS upgrades.
For the Air Force, House authorizers would preserve limitations on retiring the C-130 fleet, requiring the Air Force to retain at least 271 aircraft until October 2028. Meanwhile, they would also authorize an additional $260 million for the Air Force to buy two C-130Js and nearly $128 million for four MH-139s.
Other programs would face cuts, including a nearly $137 million decrease in R&D spending for the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft drone wingman program. And when it comes to CCA drones, House authorizers on the seapower and projection forces subcommittee note that as the Air Force gets underway with a second increment of unmanned wingmen, the service may require “aircraft with sufficient range, speed, and electrical power to potentially self-deploy from the continental United States and conduct varied missions for geographic combatant commanders.”
The Air Force has said it is studying a range of concepts for increment 2 drones, though aircraft with characteristics like those authorizers describe would likely require platforms with considerable range and speed — potentially driving toward more exquisite, and ultimately more expensive, designs.
Noting that the Navy may also need drones with similar traits, authorizers would direct both the Air Force and Navy secretaries to each deliver a report by January 2027 covering “the impact of cost while determining requirements for Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs.”
Theresa Hitchens, Michael Marrow, Diana Stancy, and Carley Welch contributed to this report.
