The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget request is coming “relatively soon,” a senior official said last week, saying it will outline a “generational investment in the joint force.”
After last year’s delayed budget rollout that irked Congress, Jay Hurst III, the department’s acting comptroller, said the forthcoming request will offer a greater level of initial detail although he did not commit to the inclusion of a five-year spending projection plan.
“There’s money for the things that your companies are working on, the defense industry’s working on. And it’s there. It’s going to be an incredible budget. But that’s all I can say for right now,” Hurst said during a panel at the Reagan Institute’s National Security Innovation Base Summit.
President Donald Trump has said he wants a $1.5 trillion defense topline for fiscal 2027, while the path to reach that spending increase is uncertain after he cast doubt on the prospects of pushing for a second reconciliation bill. Hurst declined to confirm the Pentagon’s planned topline request for fiscal 2027 or how it plans to construct the request between base budget and potential funding from a second reconciliation bill, while pointing to Trump’s social media post when asked about the level of funding the department will seek.
Congress last year lamented the Trump administration’s delayed budget request rollout which extended into the summer. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the defense appropriations panel, at the time called it “the latest budget in history” and said staggered submission of documents from the Pentagon affected appropriators’ crafting of defense spending legislation.
Hurst said the pending budget request submission will be “earlier than last year, for sure,” while adding “we’ll see” when asked if the Pentagon will include a five-year Future Years Defense Program spending outline, which was not publicly released as part of last year’s rollout.
Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), a senior member on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), said at the McAleese Conference Tuesday he has also heard the Pentagon’s budget request is likely to be sent to the Hill by late April or early May.
“The president has said very clearly he’s going to come over with a $1.5 trillion defense budget. We will mark to $1.5 trillion. Now it’s another issue about what the appropriators are going to do and where they find those dollars. But the bottom line is, we will mark [the NDAA] to that and we will look across the spectrum of the things that we need to do to build this nation’s capacity,” Wittman said, citing an interest in utilizing the topline boost to support modernization, sustainment efforts and mass production of attritable and expendable capabilities.
HASC Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), during his remarks, expressed doubts that Congress will end up ultimately approving such a massive defense spending increase.
“I don’t see a $1.5 trillion budget coming through this Congress,” Smith said. “If it did, it would set us up for a pretty big failure down the road.”
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published a version of this story.