Will Congress approve of the Pentagon’s budget?

And we're back with our defense team talking about the nearly $850 billion budget request for the Defense Department next year

We've been through some of the highlights, but at the end of the day, this is just a request

Now, as we all know, the military is totally free of politics and that there is nothing involved that would cloud this vaunted institution

But Congress, a body of politicians, after all, is not. And the president also plays a crucial role in the process

We had an unusual situation in June where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was testifying before the House and the Senate, and we actually didn't have a budget request yet

And, Jen, this created a lot of confusion for senators and members of the House as they were actually trying to ask questions about it

How do you anticipate that playing a role going forward? Well, I think one of the frustrating aspects of this unique situation is, you know, typically we have these service posture hearings with appropriators and authorizers after the budget request comes out

And so lawmakers can ask questions about specifics related to the budget or express some of their opinions about what should be happening with the budget request or should not be happening with it We didn really get that There was a lot of guessing at least on the Army front when the posture hearings

were held. The lawmakers at least had a memo that the Army had put out signaling many of the changes

that they wanted to make. So many of their questions related to that. There was, you know

some pushback on some of the cuts. But I think generally lawmakers are in favor of the Army

doing better to modernize. They've had a lot of failures on major programs in the past. They want

to see the Army succeed. Obviously, it's to everyone's benefit to see the Army succeed here

But they do still want the Army to show the ysis and show their homework. And what we

have so far with the budget request only gives us a little bit of that, what their plans are and why

they're going about it this way. Right. And I think that's going to create some confusion going forward as Congress has already started

marking up its own bills. We have the Senate and the House who have each taken a look with doing their own homework before they got the budget request And that a highly unusual situation We haven really had that in quite a long time if ever And I wondering Courtney now that things are split between the two bills here

how do you think things will actually proceed forward in getting the Pentagon, not only a stable line of funding, not to mention the chance of a CR next year

but actually getting that on time? I don't know if anyone would realistically expect something to come on time

I think it's possible that the, you know, as we see the reconciliation piece of this play out, that that may provide some, you know, near term access to additional funding

But again, like this is a little bit of uncharted territory. So we'll have to see how that plays out

I think in terms of, you know, specific to the Space Force, you know, we've seen a little bit in some of the, as you mentioned, the marks that have come out, you know, support from Congress

for a lot of what they're doing. We already seen proposals for a slight bump in their budget We know that Congress is largely on board with Golden Dome And so in that area specifically I think is maybe a little less contentious in terms of back and forth

We should say, too, going forward, you have two bills this year, reconciliation. Also

there's the Pentagon-based budget that creates close to a trillion dollars for national defense

But what will happen in FY27 when the Pentagon introduces its budget requests then? Will they

mark it up to be close to $1 trillion, or will they no longer have this sort of reconciliation

supplemental package that will get it to that number? And if they don't do that, how are they

going to make way for all these priorities like shipbuilding, like Golden Dome, that will then

have to make it into the defense budget? And what sort of orphans will they create while doing that

I think that's a good place to wrap for today. Jen, Steve, Courtney, that's all the time we have

Thank you for a great conversation and for helping us get a better sense of the uncertainty that we

have going forward. If you would like more of our coverage on these and more topics, find all of our

work on DefenseNews.com or any of our social media channels. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next week