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“This is not at all a strategy-driven [FY 2027 defense] budget. This is a budget-driven budget. If you look at the Truth Social posts by the President [Trump] and the statements of the people around him, he [President Trump] makes very clear that this budget was driven by a budget number, a budget target, an arbitrary level that was set based on five percent of last year's GDP…They set this arbitrary level and then at relatively the last minute in the budget development process the [Defense] Department was told come up with a request that gets you to this number, this $1.5 trillion number. And so they did.”
That was Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute and one of the nation's top experts on defense strategy and the defense budget, speaking last Tuesday at the Brookings Institution as part of a panel on The FY 2027 defense budget: How much is enough?
Remember, as I wrote last week, the Trump FY 2027 defense request is for $1.15 trillion with another $350 billion request to be placed in a FY 2026 reconciliation package; and there now also is the new FY 2026 supplemental request, which has another $67 billion for the Defense Department.
House members have been weighing all the defense numbers and this week may be voting on a FY 2026 reconciliation package of $95 billion with only $73 billion for defense – far less than what was being sought.
Last Tuesday, Harrison went on to explain what may have been going on: “I say it is absolutely not a strategy-driven [FY 2027 defense] budget because they didn't have to make hard choices. They made some easy choices.”
As an example, Harrison said, “Do you want, you know, a fourth generation fighter jet? Buy some new fourth generation [F-15s]; or do we want to continue buying the fifth-generation fighters like the F-35 we have in production; or do we want to invest in sixth generation fighters? Do all of them, right? You can do all three at once, if you have a virtually unlimited budget, you don't have to make those hard tradeoffs.”
And, in fact, all three are included in the proposed FY2027 defense budget.
But Harrison goes on to suggest another way to view this Trump defense budget giant increase saying, “There's still a limit to how much the department can consume in terms of this funding…because I don't think they [the Trump budgeteers] actually intend this to be like a one-year budget authority number, especially with the reconciliation [set at $350 billion]. I think it is actually more like a five-year budget number that they're trying to get pre-funded up front, but they actually plan to spend it at a slower pace over the next five years.”
Harrison also looked at “the parts that I think absolutely don't belong in here are these big pots of money they created in defense-wide accounts that have very little description with them.”
For example, he picked out “$54 billion in the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) line item. That is a single program element that's got $54 billion in it,” Harrison said. “That's unprecedented. If you read the budget description with it, it gives very little detail. You know, it's [clears throat] supposed to be investments in drones and things like that, but like tell us
quantities, tell us specific types of drones, like tell us what you're going to be using it for, and that detail is not there.”
Harrison went on, “It appears they haven't figured that out yet, so I think $54 billion is quite a reach, trying to ask for that much money for something that has not yet been well defined. So, I think that there are areas here where they've really overshot and they've tried to just throw everything in there and ask for a super high number. And I wonder if they almost expect that they're not going to get that full number -- that Congress will cut them back down quite a bit. But they were just trying to reach that overall $1.5 trillion level.”
As Yahoo Finance pointed out earlier this month, the $54 billion for DAWG sought for FY 2027 is 243 times greater than what DAWG got this year, and “now exceeds the entire Marine Corps budget request of $52.8 billion and represents nearly 15% of the entire $350 billion reconciliation package.”
Harrison’s view: “You get to the endgame, Congress is going to have to sort through this and say, ‘Okay, what are the what things in here are serious things that really do need to get funded one way or the other, and we'll have to figure out how to make that happen, and what are the other things that were just budget gimmicks or just filler?’"
Harrison was not the only expert on last Tuesday’s Brookings panel.
Joining him were David Wessel, who runs Brookings’ tax and fiscal policy in the economic studies program; and Mara Karlin, professor at John's Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, who has worked for six Defense Secretaries over her career.
Wessel took a broader financial view saying, “The President is proposing a big defense budget at a time when we have unsustainable fiscal trajectory, and so I think that raises an important question and that question is…budgeting is about tradeoffs and the President and Congress at the moment seem to be avoiding trade-offs. There are ways we could offset if defense spending is really important. We should think about ways to pay for some of it either by cutting some other places in defense or raising taxes. And there's some ideas floating around on that, but none of them are politically popular.”
Wessel also raised two other issues: “I think it also requires some trust on the part of the public that the money is being well spent and that relies on Congress doing oversight. And secondly, that we are sticking with a military that is nonpartisan and follows the leadership of the President and the Congress, but is not totally politicized. And I'm afraid that the trust in the military is being eroded by some of the personnel decisions that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is making. And I think that's a problem.”
As for Karlin, she referred to the Trump national strategy and focused on what she called “a break with the bipartisanship that has characterized how folks have thought about these threats for a long time.”
Karlin noted, “The real emphasis of this [Trump national] strategy is on the Western Hemisphere, right? The real threat is seen in this strategy as these alleged narco-terrorists as they're so named…So, that's the priority.”
But, she adds, “You then see China mentioned, but in a pretty circumscribed way, just the first island chain. And in general, the language reads a lot softer than almost any recent defense strategy. You see a desire to downgrade involvement in European affairs, a little bit of mention of the Middle East, but in no way signaling that we would be starting this massive [Iran] conflict. And so here's where I think, there's some confusion worth highlighting because traditionally a national defense strategy is a decoder ring. It's going to tell you where the Secretary of Defense will put their energy and attention.”
“When we look at this budget, this very large budget, that's really at kind of World War levels,” Karlin said, “and frankly, the number [$1.5 trillion] isn't really merited by the strategy.”
She explained, “If one were really to just prioritize the Western Hemisphere and this quite circumcised focus on China as a major threat, and not be involved in most other regions of the world, in fact, the Trump administration could have put out a quite tiny defense budget request. So I leave you with a bit of perplexity.”
Two more things Harrison mentioned need recording.
“I forgot to address the [Trump] battleship issue,” Harrison said at one point, “because you know that's in here and far from defending it, I think that's one of those examples of things that got thrown in because they didn't have to make tough choices.”
Then he explained, “No one in the Navy can say with a straight face that we're going to go from starting a brand-new, clean-ship design in FY 2027, to procuring the lead-class [battle]ship in FY 2028, to going to all the way by FY 2031 being at full rate production, ready to buy them at one per year. That doesn't pass the laugh test…And so are we just setting ourselves up to spend a few billion dollars chasing, you know, this weird idea before we eventually have to cancel it and then things go back to the way they were before.”
Finally, Harrison said, “I think there needs to be some fundamental look on the congressional side at just how do we reform the budget process to get it working again; open the aperture to things like changing the start date of the fiscal year [which now begins October 1], re-jiggering the committee structure.”
I believe Harrison is questioning why each year the Armed Services Committees in both the House and Senate each authorize spending programs, and then the House and Senate Appropriations Committees set the actual dollar-level of funds made available for that year.
“You know,” Harrison said, “I'm talking a lot of third rails here, but I think we're at that kind of point like we were in the early 1970s where Congress realized it [the budgeting process] just wasn't working. I think that they need to do some serious inward-looking reform like that.”
I agree, having twice worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1960s, and followed defense spending over the past 60 years. Harrison is right – the Legislative Branch system for passing Executive Branch funding needs to be repaired.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
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“In addition to supporting OEF (Operation Epic Fury, the Iran War) costs incurred by DOW (Department of War), the [$87.6 billion Fiscal Year FY 2026 Supplemental Trump administration] request provides $768 million to the Department of Energy to support nuclear and other energy security requirements, primarily for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for OEF-related activities.”
I was intrigued by that segment, from a June 24 letter to House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director Russell T. Vought, because I could not imagine what costly “nuclear and other energy security requirements” NNSA – the U.S. nuclear weapons complex – could be playing in the Iran War.
However, a chart attached to Vought’s letter said that $672 million was for NNSA to fund “activities for complete and verifiable termination of Iran’s ability to develop or acquire a nuclear weapon, including the disposition of proliferation sensitive material, technology, equipment, and infrastructure.”
Another $95.5 million, destined for the Department of Energy’s Environmental and Other Defense Activities elements, was listed for “support of Operation Epic Fury and other classified purposes.”
Perhaps members of the Senate Armed Services Committee can find out about the plans behind this $782 million package for NNSA and Energy this morning [July 14], when they question Jules W. Hurst III, who is up for confirmation as Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller).
By the way, when was the last time a U.S. President went to war and added a tax to help pay for it? As an old-timer I remember – it was 1968, when then-President Lyndon Johnson got Congress to pass a nine-month, 10 percent surcharge on individual and corporate taxpayers to help pay for the Vietnam War. Low-income individual taxpayers were entirely exempt from the surcharge.
Since then, both Republican and Democratic Presidents used deficit spending and borrowing to pay for military conflicts. So far this year, the nation’s total deficit has increased through May 2026 by $1.25 trillion, according to the Treasury Department, with Defense Department spending running $20 billion more through May 2026, than it was last year.
But I remind you, Congress now has three defense funding requests before it: a $1.1 trillion FY 2027 base budget request; an additional $350 billion request to be placed in a 2026 reconciliation package; and now the new FY 2026 supplemental request, which has $67 billion for the Defense Department.
No one can say for sure how Congress will deal with these requests that total over $1.5 trillion.
For comparison, I point out that according to a December 8, 2014, Congressional Research Service study, Congress, over the prior 13 years, approved total appropriations of $1.6 trillion for Afghan and Iraq “military operations, base support, weapons maintenance, training of Afghan and Iraq security forces, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care for the war operations initiated since the 9/11[2001] attacks.”
What the Vought chart also shows is that almost 23 percent of the funds in what has been described as the Iran War supplemental, went for different and, in some cases, totally unrelated purposes that I will describe below.
As for the NNSA money, a FoxNews story June 24, said, “The funding would support the removal and elimination of Iranian nuclear materials, including uranium hexafluoride (UF6), uranium in various forms and research reactor fuel, including highly-enriched uranium, according to details shared by a White House official.”
FoxNews also said, “The request also would fund U.S. verification activities inside Iran, support inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, strengthen nuclear-smuggling detection efforts and expand Nuclear Emergency Support Team operations across the Middle East.”
In short, Trump is asking for funds to deal with Iran’s enriched uranium before he has any agreement with Tehran that gives the U.S. access to that material.
Perhaps Trump thinks in the end he will have immediate success with Tehran as in he did in Venezuela. There, after the U.S. seized President Nicolas Maduro in January 2026, and four months later, in May, NNSA removed from Venezuela 13.54 kilograms – approximately 30 pounds – of highly-enriched uranium from a legacy research reactor in that country which had been shut down since the early 1990s.
The supplemental request also contains $1.5 billion for the State Department’s of which $850 million is for the Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems program at high-risk diplomatic posts overseas along with security upgrades and equipment replacement. Another $300 million for Embassy construction and maintenance would be used to address needs following the start of the Iran war in Bahrain, Dubai, Karachi, Lahore and Riyadh, according to the Vought chart.
The State request also includes $100 million for the Diplomatic and Consular Service account to meet unanticipated needs related to the Middle East situation including departure assistance to U.S. citizens seeking to leave the region with their families. Transfer authority and an increase in repatriation loan level is also being requested to meet the needs of destitute U.S. citizens.
Another $1.35 billion for the State Department is sought to deal with the Ebola Virus, or as Vought put it in his letter to Speaker Johnson, “These funds would be used to limit the spread of Ebola beyond the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda to other vulnerable nations and ensure the virus does not reach U.S. shores.”
Some $800 million for State is proposed for the International Humanitarian Assistance account, formerly managed by USAID, and another $550 million for Global Health Security, which funds “would support contact tracing, personal protective equipment and commodity procurement, disease surveillance, laboratory capacity, and cross-border coordination,” according to the Vought chart.
There is another $2 billion for the U.S. Coast Guard to support OEF where Pentagon “assets are not available to support Western Hemisphere operations. This includes funding for operations at the Southern Border, ” according to the Vought chart.
Meanwhile, the largest amount, other than for OEF in the supplemental, is $11.1 billion for the Agriculture Department, the bulk of which, $10 billion, would be for American farmers as “temporary economic assistance for row and specialty crops planted in crop year 2026,” according to the Vought chart. An additional $1.1 billion is being requested specifically for farmers in Florida “to rebound from devastating losses that were the result of crippling storms this past winter.”
I believe that money has political implications because rural Americans are pulling away from the President. As Brookings Institution polling recently showed, “Only 24% of white rural voters think that the condition of the economy is excellent or good, while 77% rate it as fair or poor. Just 16% say their family’s financial situation is better than it was two years ago (near the end of the Biden administration), compared to 49% who say they are worse off.”
Then there is $1 billion in the war supplemental to assist in the final design and construction for renovation of New York City’s Penn Station. In a New York Times op-ed last Friday, Rep. Jerold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said that the White House last year took control of the $8 billion Penn Station project from the [New York] Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Rep. Nadler wrote, “Behind closed doors, Mr. Trump has already attempted a quid-pro-quo, offering federal funding for New York’s transit needs only if Penn Station and [Virginia’s] Dulles Airport are renamed for him.”
However, Nadler also noted, “It’s still $7 billion short, and with top appropriators already opposing the supplemental funding request, it’s unlikely to be approved anyway.”
Another $1 billion in the war supplemental, according to the Vought chart, is for the Labor Department’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation “to increase the benefit levels for participants of certain pension plans that were sponsored by Delphi Corporation and terminated as a result of General Motors ' bankruptcy in 2009.”
The money would reverse pension reductions for some 20,000 retirees that have spent years arguing their pensions were unfairly reduced after the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation assumed responsibility for the company’s pension plans during GM’s 2009 financial crisis.
According to the Detroit Free Press, “Various legislative efforts to restore the benefits have failed or stalled, despite bipartisan support. Perhaps knowing it's a potentially powerful issue in the Midwest, Trump (and President Joe Biden before him) has signaled his support of the workers in politically sensitive moments such as just before the 2020 election.”
Then there is $500 million for the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. for, as the Vought chart explains, improvements to the World War II Memorial on the Mall and restoration and construction for the Tidal Basin Seawall along West Potomac Park to include the planting of hundreds of new cherry trees and stabilizing the surrounding grounds.
Last Friday, the conservative group Americans for Prosperity pointed out that even the supplemental’s defense and Iran-related spending “deserve further scrutiny,” noting that $15.6 billion for the Pentagon are justified by Vought simply as “Administration priorities,” “Readiness,” and “Classified Programs.”
In fact, I think the whole package needs congressional oversight, and from the reactions of some key Senate and House leaders, that’s what it’s going to get.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
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