HAC-D advances $831.5 billion defense bill after pressing Hegseth on lack of budget details

House defense appropriators on Tuesday advanced their $831.5 billion fiscal year 2026 spending bill, just hours after pressing senior Pentagon leaders on the lack of details regarding the administration’s budget plans.

While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered some insight into a few specific funding plans, he faced bipartisan pushback from the panel over having to craft their appropriations proposal without having received a complete budget blueprint.

“It’s hard for us to do our job without the [budget justification] books, without the detailed information, and I know you know that. So you might talk to your friends at [the Office of Management and Budget], if OMB has any friends, I don’t know if they do, and see if they can get this going for us because it’d be very helpful,” Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said at the hearing.

The White House in May rolled out a “skinny” budget outline for fiscal ‘26, touting an “unprecedented” 13% boost in defense spending, while the proposed $1 trillion national defense topline factored in a $113 billion increase that would come from funds in the pending reconciliation bill.

Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), the HAC-D ranking member, said the budget outline was a “very rough draft” and lamented that Congress has yet to receive a full budget submission with the start of the next fiscal year less than four months away. 

“Today we are forced to mark up a rushed and, for me, an incomplete defense appropriations act. I don’t blame Chairman Cole or Chairman Calvert. The fault is squarely on the administration,” McCollum said. “We do not have the critical information, the granular details, on the DoD programs that we need to make in order to be effective and efficient with our decisions.”

HAC-D unveiled its $831.5 billion proposal on Monday, a flat spending level when compared to fiscal ‘25 enacted funding but which aligns with the administration’s plan to factor in reconciliation funds to achieve a $1 trillion total topline. 

The full Appropriations Committee is set to consider the legislation along with the Department of Homeland Security bill on Thursday, while House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said he agreed with McCollum that the panel “needs more information” than it’s received so far.

“Again, I understand all the complexities of being a new administration. Nobody ever meets the timeline when they first come into office. And we’ve gotten a lot of good information from OMB. But the reality is we, frankly, need more than we’ve received so far to make the decisions that we’re called on to make,” Cole said. 

Hegseth provided some specifics from the Pentagon’s $961.6 billion FY ‘26 budget request, with the figures likely factoring in anticipated reconciliation funds, to include $25 billion for Golden Dome, more than $62 billion “to modernize and sustain our nuclear forces,” $6 billion to bolster the shipbuilding industrial base, and a total of $47 billion for shipbuilding.

Hegseth also said DoD is planning for a 14% increase for the Columbia-class program in fiscal ‘26 and said the department can provide additional details on its plans to the subcommittee.

McCollum noted that HAC-D can only work with discretionary spending and not funds in reconciliation, and the panel does not have a breakdown yet from the Pentagon on how its budget would account for the different funding categories. 

Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published this story.