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President Trump’s historic defense budget request lays the foundation for returning America’s defenses from Biden’s dangerous cuts.  Congress should fully support it – and carry the vision forward with supplemental funding to equip him to successfully defend America.

Key Points:
  • On Friday, the Office of Management and Budget announced its $1.01 trillion FY2026 defense budget request to Congress.  Congress should fully fund this budget request, which is a vital deposit on America’s military readiness.
  • After years of dangerous defense cuts and hollow rhetoric under the Biden Administration, President Trump deserves immense credit for advancing the largest military budget in history.  That’s because he knows a trillion-dollar deterrent is cheaper than a multi-trillion-dollar war.  
  • Facing generational threats requires generational investments.  Congress has a responsibility to provide the President with negotiating leverage and military tools to protect the homeland.  Doing so will require passing and building on this budget proposal.
  • The Biden Administration believed in Peace Through Slogans while cutting America’s defense budget.  But President Trump and his conservative allies in Congress know Peace Through Strength means funding the fight.  Biden’s runaway inflation has made that task more difficult than ever: A trillion dollars at the end of President Trump’s first term today has the purchasing power of only $825 billion now.  That means our military must buy less for more unless its budget grows.
  • Biden’s weakness and incompetence made our military more expensive and our world more dangerous to America.  But Congress can’t allow Biden’s inflation crisis to have the final word on our national security. To meet the moment, lawmakers should adopt President Trump’s trillion-dollar budget request plus $150 billion in supplemental funding for a total of $1.16 trillion – a level that would emulate Reagan’s military build-up that helped win the Cold War.
America’s Military is Falling Behind
  • U.S. defense spending has declined for the last 35 years.  As a share of federal outlays, military funding has fallen from 28.1 percent in 1987 to just 13 percent in FY2024.  That means just one out of every eight federal dollars goes to defending our country, even though it is the clearest constitutional duty of the federal government.
  • Military expenditures have also decreased as a share of GDP over the past 50 years.  The U.S. currently spends 2.9 percent of total GDP on the U.S. military, far smaller than the last time we faced other superpower rivals.  
  • Biden’s funding cuts have left the U.S. military budget at its smallest since before WWII while the CCP conducts the most rapid peacetime military buildup in all of history.  Last year alone, China spent more on defense than the next four largest Asian nations combined and upped its defense budget by 7 percent for the fourth year in a row (not even counting that China’s real defense budget is likely $700 billion).
Ditching ‘Business as Usual’ on Defense Spending 
  • America faces an array of threats—from the CCP’s military provocations to Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon and Russia’s aggression in Europe.  We won’t deter great-power conflict on the cheap – and budget gimmicks like Continuing Resolutions (CRs) make it even harder. 
  • CRs freeze the Pentagon’s budget, delaying “new starts”, crippling procurement, and blocking innovation. Every month under a CR is a month lost in preparing for future conflict. Neither budgetary gimmicks nor accounting work-arounds are a substitute for clear and sustained defense spending.
The American People Agree
  • According to the Ronald Reagan Institute’s latest National Defense Survey, a whopping 8 in 10 Americans support raising defense spending–including 88% of voters who supported President Trump. 
  • That is even more striking considering that nearly half of the U.S. public believes the U.S. defense budget is significantly larger than it is.  A third of Americans believe it accounts for one-quarter to one-half of federal spending–and another 16% believes defense spending exceeds half of the entire federal budget.
  • The American people believe U.S. defense spending is significantly higher than it is–and they still want it to be even higher.
Biden-Era Budgets Won’t Meet the Moment
  • Today’s defense shortfalls aren’t theoretical—they are real and immediate:
    • U.S. shipyards can’t match China’s peacetime production, with Chinese naval shipbuilding capacity 232 times greater than ours.
    • Munitions stockpiles for precision weapons and air/missile defense have reached critically low levels after years of drawdowns and underfunding.
    • Our defense industrial base is stretched thin, with vendor consolidation, workforce attrition, and brittle supply chains threatening surge capacity.
  • Congress should abandon Biden’s approach of managing our military’s decline and raise the FY2026 budget topline by an additional $150 billion.  That would ensure full funding for President Trump’s priorities: expanding shipbuilding and restoring our maritime industrial capacity, increasing homeland missile defense with the Golden Dome initiative, replenishing depleted munition stockpiles, enhancing our forward posture in the Indo-Pacific, and more.