WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s newly revealed $1.5 trillion budget for fiscal 2027— comprising a $1.15 trillion base request and $350 billion in reconciliation — will face an uphill battle on Capitol Hill, analysts told Breaking Defense.
“This is not a sure thing,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the American Enterprise Institute. “This is not going to be easy to get through Congress, even with the president’s party having majorities in both chambers.”
While the request will likely satisfy defense hawks who have pressed Pentagon officials to put forward a budget that captures the totality of what the military thinks it needs, the sheer size of the request could make it difficult for lawmakers to swallow. The $1.15 trillion base budget request alone represents the first ever to top the $1 trillion mark.
“On the one hand, it has a lot of the things that Congress has been asking the department to focus on: heavy investments in munitions production — both interceptors and offensive weapons, heavy investments in shipbuilding, heavy investments in space based stuff,” said Carlton Haelig, a fellow with the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. “But it’s still a really large ask to put that before Congress at $1.5 trillion.”
The first task for Republicans will be pushing through a reconciliation bill with $350 billion for defense — more than double the $150 billion contained in the reconciliation bill approved last year. Trump has given Republicans a June 1 deadline to pass the reconciliation bill, with the House Budget Committee slated to meet on Wednesday to discuss the FY27 budget.
A reconciliation bill can be passed with a simple majority, and with 53 Republicans in the Senate, that should be fairly easy. However, margins are razor thin for House Republicans, who occupy 217 seats after California Rep. Kevin Kiley switched his party affiliation to independent in March. Although Kiley has continued to caucus with the GOP, some fiscal hawks have criticized using the reconciliation process to increase spending, with Republican Reps. Thomas Massie and Brian Fitzpatrick ultimately voting against the bill last year.
“They can only afford to lose one vote in the House,” Harrison said. “That package is going to have to be carefully crafted to balance the concerns of the fiscal conservatives as well as the more moderates in the party who don’t want to see offsetting cuts in things like Medicare and Medicaid.
“This is going to be a very delicate political maneuver for [House Speaker Mike] Johnson to try to get this through,” he added. “It’s going to be hard.”
Meanwhile, the $1.15 trillion defense base budget will face a tougher road to passage in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed, Harrison said. With a majority that doesn’t breach that threshold, Republicans will have to get some Democrats onboard to push the bill forward.
That, too, could be a difficult gambit, due to cuts to areas such as food assistance, housing and public health, which have riled Democrats who typically seek parity on increases to defense and nondefense spending.
“There’s no way they can get the 60 votes because of the non-defense cuts,” Harrison said. “If they were going to get it through, they would have to compromise by reversing some of those non-defense cuts to agencies like NASA and others.”
Democratic opposition to US strikes on Iran, as well as continued pleas for more details from key Republicans, could also play a part. Becca Wasser, the defense lead at Bloomberg Economics, posited that the administration could be compelled to provide new information about operations as a way of solidifying support for defense spending.
“There’s been a lot of conversations within Congress about desire for greater transparency on issues like the Iran war, and that might be part of the trade off,” she said, adding that even with a “very convincing case” for added funding, “there’s still going to be a lot of pressure” from lawmakers.
Another potential headwind is the upcoming midterm election, where analysts predict Democrats could take control of at least one chamber of Congress.
“I think there’s very little hope of the base budget being enacted before the midterm elections,” Harrison said.
Should Democrats win a single chamber in November, they will likely wait until the new session of Congress begins in January to restart negotiations with Republicans, with a spending deal following somewhere in the February or March timeframe. Should Democrats defy the odds and take both the House and Senate, they could completely disregard the president’s budget request and draft their own bill, Harrison said.
And Haelig added that Democrats could seek to use reconciliation to advance their own political priorities if they controlled Congress.
“It just raises, I think, secondary questions about, why do it through reconciliation?” he said. “How do we make the reconciliation process more robust for oversight and accountability in terms of spending?”
‘Mortgaging Modernization’
According to the Office of Management and Budget, the 44 percent boost to the defense budget in FY27 “exceeds even the Reagan buildup.” The request includes elevated funding for Trump administration priorities, including $17.5 billion for Golden Dome, $5 billion for the F-47 sixth-generation fighter, as well as the first funding for the Trump-class battleship, which stands to receive $1 billion for advance procurement.
Both Haelig and Wasser pointed out that much of the funding for some of the administration’s top modernization priorities is housed within the reconciliation spending request. Haelig specifically noted that 93 percent of the budget increase for munitions is reliant on reconciliation.
“It’s really setting up the reconciliation fight as paramount to continuing the defense modernization push,” he said. “They’re trying to push the reconciliation package through because it contains so much of the critical capabilities, even more so given that those are the exact type of things that have been severely depleted in the last few weeks in the conflict with Iran.”
The big exception, Haelig added, is the shipbuilding and conversion account, where only 9 percent of spending is made up of reconciliation funds.
Despite the Trump administration’s record-breaking budget request for FY27, OMB’s five-year plan through FY31 shows defense spending is not slated to hit $1.5 trillion again in that timeframe. While base budget defense spending is set to rise to $1.35 trillion in FY31, per OMB, no additional reconciliation funding is currently anticipated through the rest of Trump’s term.
Wasser speculated that the massive bump to defense spending in FY27 could be a negotiating tactic, and that by starting from a “maximalist position,” the Trump administration positions itself to get a larger budget than it would have if it had offered a more typically-sized funding increase.
“I do wonder if some of this is ‘Here’s our best case for what we would like to have and like to see,’ acknowledging that this is probably going to change over time, based on what [happens] when Congress gets involved, based on what industry can actually do,” she said.
But even if the administration gets the $1.5 trillion it’s asking for in FY27, when reconciliation funds disappear the following year, the Pentagon will be left having to figure out how to fund the same batch of priorities with less money, Haelig said.
“It’s really this idea of like, mortgaging modernization through reconciliation,” he said, “but then that does eventually come home to roost in future budget years.”
