The path to achieve the White House’s call for a $1.5 trillion defense topline in 2027 appears murkier now after President Donald Trump has cast doubt on the prospects of a second reconciliation bill.
After Republicans included $150 billion for defense in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signs pointed to a push for another reconciliation bill with GOP-led policy and spending items in order to achieve Trump’s goal for a massive defense spending increase in fiscal 2027.
“There was something in there for everybody, and that’s how we got it passed,” Trump said of the OBBBA in a Fox Business interview with Larry Kudlow on Feb. 9. “And so in theory, we’ve gotten everything passed that we need. Now we just have to manage it, but we’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years.”
Trump said in January he would push for increasing defense spending to $1.5 trillion in fiscal 2027 in order to “build the ‘Dream Military.’”
The top lawmakers on the House and Senate Armed Services Committee have both backed Trump’s call for the spending boost, which would represent a nearly 50% increase over the fiscal 2026 topline when factoring in the reconciliation funds allocated for defense..
The OBBBA passed last July included $150 billion for defense to be spent over four years, with the Trump administration apportioning $113 billion for fiscal year 2026 to achieve a $1 trillion defense topline when combined with the base defense budget request.
Trump, when asked in the interview about the prospect of doing another reconciliation bill, said Republican leadership in Congress viewed the first one as “a long shot” and that passing the OBBBA “was sort of a miracle.”
“Plenty of people said, ‘You can’t get it done. Don’t do it. It’ll be bad.’ And we put everything together and this was a four-year package and we put it together and we got it passed,” Trump said, adding his priority would be “perfecting a little bit of what we did” with the first reconciliation bill.
Without accounting for the prospect of another reconciliation bill, the White House would have to outline a $1.5 trillion base budget request for fiscal 2027 to meet Trump’s defense topline goal.
Senate Budget Committee Democrats earlier this month raised “significant concern” with the Pentagon’s move to classify its plan for current reconciliation spending, stating it “risks further turning reconciliation funding into a slush fund.”
The House and Senate Armed Services Committees were responsible for crafting the defense portions of the reconciliation bill, while the final allocation of those funds is ultimately allocated by the Trump administration and Pentagon.
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published a version of this story.