The House on Thursday evening voted 341-88 to pass the final $839 billion fiscal year 2026 Defense Appropriations Bill.
The measure was part of a three-bill “minibus” spending package, which also included the Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Transportation appropriations bills. It now heads to the Senate.
The upper chamber returns next week and will have just a few days to consider the legislation ahead of the government shutdown deadline on Jan. 30.
The bill includes $27.2 billion to build 17 ships, including one Columbia-class submarine and two Virginia-class submarines.
For aircraft, the bill includes $7.6 billion to fund 47 F-35s and $1.9 billion for the B-21 bomber program.
The spending package with the defense appropriations legislation appears to have the backing of some Senate Democrats, after the party’s top appropriators said the bill “rejects all the poison pill riders proposed by House Republicans.”
“The bill seeks to address growing adversarial alignment, adversaries’ growing defense investments, current U.S. capability gaps, readiness challenges compounded by high operational tempos, and the need to maintain American military superiority and deter aggression,” according to the Republican Senate appropriators summary of the bill. “The bill also provides funding to help address critical munitions shortfalls and the harm caused by the stagnant defense budgets and significant inflation during the previous administration,”
The final topline increase falls in between the House’s earlier defense appropriations bill that adhered to the Trump administration’s $830.7 billion topline request for the Pentagon and the Senate’s larger $21.7 billion spending boost included with its original bill, both which were passed by the respective chambers last July.
“Our additional topline of $8.4 billion was easily gobbled up by trying to take care of the broken glass of emerging requirements requested by the administration after the budget submission and by this truly urgent problem of getting after a munitions shortfall challenge and production capacity challenge,” a senior Senate GOP staffer told reporters Tuesday.
The Trump administration had laid out a plan for a $1 trillion defense topline for fiscal 2026 between the base budget request for national defense and utilizing $113 billion of the total $150 billion in defense reconciliation funds included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
The senior Senate GOP aide said that $5.5 billion of the $8.4 topline increase went to addressing “broken glass” requirements, which he described as funding misalignments with the reconciliation process or items that didn’t make it into the OBBBA. This included $1.9 billion for ship operational costs, $1.9 billion for the Virginia-class submarine program, $485 million for the cost to complete prior year shipbuilding programs, and $283 million for submarine and ship repairs and improvements.
The “broken glass” requirements ultimately ended up totaling $26.5 billion, according to the staff member. That was in addition to the $53.7 billion in unfunded priorities lists submitted by the military services and combatant commands.
“Obviously we didn’t have enough money to cover all of that,” the senior GOP Senate staffer told reporters, adding the final $839.7 billion funding level is “a demonstrably inadequate topline to meet the demonstrated requirements that the department itself acknowledged to us.”
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published a version of this story.