Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget Should Not Come as a Surprise

Erin D. Dumbacher is the Stanton nuclear security senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael C. Horowitz is a senior fellow for technology and innovation at the Council and director of Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, and Lauren Kahn is a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. 

President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social on January 8 that he would ask Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget for the next fiscal year (FY). Many national defense experts have argued for years that increases in the budget are necessary to modernize the U.S. military, particularly to deter and defeat peer adversaries such as China rather than terrorist groups and smaller states. 

But Trump’s announcement comes with a bit of sticker shock. If the administration follows through with it, this proposal would constitute a 66 percent increase over the 2026 defense budget that Congress just authorized. 

Trump’s announcement could be a negotiating tactic. Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has suggested that the administration might seek another reconciliation bill from Congress, which could pass on a party-line vote, to increase defense spending. The $1.5 trillion could then be split between a party-line reconciliation bill and the regular defense budget process.

But, if it isn’t a negotiating tactic, this sudden budget increase would signal dramatic growth over the administration’s defense budget policies in its first year, and especially its early days. One of the first acts of the incoming Pentagon team, with help from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was to cut 8 percent of the Pentagon’s budget—estimated to be around $50 billion annually—across the five-year fiscal year defense program.

This was followed by further cuts and measures looking for efficiencies, estimated at another $5 billion to $11 billion. The strongest indicator of the second Trump administration’s initial goal, however, was the administration’s FY2026 budget request of $848.3 billion—$1.5 billion less than the $849.8 billion proposed by the Biden administration for FY2025. Given the effects of inflation, the FY2026 budget would have reduced the Pentagon’s purchasing power, if not for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which provided an additional $150 billion. 

One could therefore view Trump’s advocacy for such a large spending increase as a surprise. But, in the context of global threats to the United States, a long overdue defense modernization bill, and the ambitions of Trump’s signature defense priorities, the request should probably have been expected. For example, paying for a “Golden Dome for America” could cost trillions of dollars [PDF] over the next decade, and the Golden Fleet and the Boeing F-47 fighter jet will also cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Additionally, fielding many of the One Big Beautiful Bill’s priorities, which includes spending tens of billions of dollars on precise mass capabilities and other lower cost systems that could be fielded quickly, would require additional funding over time to sustain and make them part of the U.S. military’s arsenal.

Trump’s announcement is also notable in combination with an executive order that he released the same day. The order directed the Pentagon to prevent defense contractors from buying back stocks from investors or conducting corporate distributions when they are underperforming on defense contracts. Given the way the defense industrial base has struggled to deliver—for many reasons—big-ticket items like fighter jets and submarines, those provisions could have real consequences if they aren’t political theater.

Essentially, Trump’s defense budget announcement is consistent with something that many defense experts have said for years: the need for a larger defense budget at some level, even though the $1.5 trillion figure is eye-popping. Assuming there are limited trade-offs in spending for other national priorities, additional defense spending could modernize the U.S. military to contend with great-power competitors such as China. It is also true that the defense industrial base has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promises, so substantive reforms need to accompany any additional spending to yield results.

Defense spending alone—even such a significant increase—will not deliver the capabilities the United States needs to protect its national interests. Defense spending growth needs to be accompanied by an increase in defense industrial base capacity, follow-through on scaling precise mass systems in the short term, and further reform of Pentagon processes to build the modern U.S. military.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the authors. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional position on matters of policy.