While the Senate’s appropriations bill for the Department of Defense includes a $21.7 billion topline increase, many nuclear modernization programs in the DoD got a reduction.
The Senate Appropriations Committee last Thursday voted to advance its $852.5 billion fiscal 2026 defense spending bill, approving a $21.7 billion topline increase that boosts funds for shipbuilding, munitions and Ukraine aid.
Senate appropriators voted 26-3 to advance the defense spending bill, with Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) opposing the legislation.
The Senate is likely to take up the defense appropriations bill after returning from its August recess, and then will eventually have to settle the difference in topline with the House’s version of the bill that sticks to the administration’s requested spending level.
In terms of programs that received cuts in the SAC-D bill, the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider stealth bomber got a $666 million “classified” reduction from SAC-D compared to the Air Force’s nearly $2.6 billion request.
While the Air Force requested almost $224 million for B-52 modifications in fiscal 2026, SAC-D reduced that by $128 million due to Radar Modernization Program (RMP) development delays. In May, the Air Force said that RMP had exceeded the 15% significant unit cost increase threshold under the fiscal 1982 National Defense Authorization Act’s Nunn-McCurdy provision “due to design, production, and installation cost increases.”
SAC-D also cut the Air Force’s nearly $607 million research and development request for the future nuclear-tipped Long Range Standoff Missile (LRSO) by $235 million due to unjustified funds, or funds that lack sufficient Congressional oversight or authorization, requested by the Air Force for termination liability.
The B-52H bomber is to get a new rotary launcher for LRSO, and eventually the Air Force wants LRSO to fly aboard the B-21.
When asked by the Exchange Monitor at a background briefing last week about funding to other nuclear modernization programs, such as the Northrop Grumman Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, a senior Senate GOP aide said the programs’ funding was a “mystery.”
“They’re not funded on our bill, because they were requested as reconciliation, and so we were expected to have a request for Sentinel and SLCM-N [the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile] but those were taken care of in reconciliation,” the aide said. “And so there are the sorts of things where, I think there is bipartisan support, they are long term modernization programs that our nation requires, and it’s the sort of thing that should be funded in a base appropriations bill on an annual basis.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), chair of the Appropriations Defense subcommittee, has previously pushed back on the administration’s reliance on funds in the reconciliation bill to achieve its proposed $1 trillion national defense topline, calling it a “budgetary sleight of hand,” with the the Pentagon having planned to use $113 billion in FY ‘26 from the total $150 billion to cover large portions of spending for several high-priority programs (Defense Daily, May 13).
“We can’t treat reconciliation like a cure-all. I was glad to vote for the One Big Beautiful Bill. But let’s not kid ourselves – it was not the additive defense spending some of us had hoped for. Moving must-pay bills for major long-standing programs from base to reconciliation still makes little sense to me,” McConnell said at last week’s markup. “And somehow, the process seems to have also allowed important programs to slip through the cracks. In fact, senior Pentagon officials have already come to me and the Ranking Member to report that they’re still billions of dollars short on programs that we were told reconciliation would address.
Along with adding $21.7 billion above the Pentagon’s budget request, the senior Senate GOP aide noted appropriators achieved spending increases by identifying “billions of dollars in savings that would have other gone to un-executable projects due to delayed contracts, underperforming programs, massive amounts of carryover or canceled programs that essentially had zombie funding,” meaning funding for programs that have expired their legislative authorization.
SAC-D included an $8.7 billion increase above the budget request for shipbuilding, which covered items included on the Pentagon’s total $10 billion list of “misaligned funds,” with the bill funding $500 million for the “cost to complete” vessels currently under construction, $1.9 billion in advanced procurement costs for an additional Columbia-class submarine and $2.6 billion for advanced procurement of two Virginia-class submarines.
The senior Senate GOP aide noted the difficulty SAC-D had in crafting the bill with the administration’s delayed budget rollout, which subcommittee ranking member Chris Coons (D-Del.) said during the markup was “the latest budget in history” and that some documents have still not been submitted.
“We received [the administration’s] budget very late. The budget documentations we received were incomplete. We are still missing some budget material that we would traditionally get. The budget briefings we got were incomplete. We didn’t get spend plans for many programs and in almost no case did we understand what the Future Year Defense Program [five-year budgeting projection] looks like…All of that affects our ability to write a bill in a manner that we would prefer,” the aide said.
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily contributed to this story.
