McConnell readies for battle to boost defense spending

Source: The Hill

08/31/25 6:00 AM ET


The House and Senate are headed for a tussle over the annual, must-pass defense spending bill as the upper chamber’s version stands at odds with the budget passed by the House and a proposal from the Trump administration. The Republican-led Senate Appropriations Committee last month approved nearly $853 billion for the Defense Department for fiscal year 2026, a bill that allocates $21.7 billion more than President Trump requested earlier this year.

The topline increase, which includes a significant bump in munitions, pay raises for troops and support for Ukraine, puts the chamber on a collision course with the House, which wrote its version of the defense spending bill before the administration dropped its budget and before the final version of the reconciliation bill passed.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who chairs the Appropriations panel’s defense subcommittee and crafted the major rewrite of Trump’s defense budget, previewed the fight to come when he remarked that the administration has “underestimated the level of challenge that we have.”

The Senate bill “underscores that we cannot seriously address these challenges while artificially constraining our resources,” McConnell said July 31 during the Senate Appropriations markup. “We can’t build a Golden Dome, or restock our munitions, or bring back American shipbuilding without sustained increased investments in all of our national defense. And we can’t treat reconciliation like a cure-all.”

Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5445566-trump-defense-budget-fight/