Pentagon spending could freeze below $900 billion without a budget deal
Democrats fresh off their midterm wins are moving against President Trump’s signature defense projects, according to lawmakers. Their targets include a new class of battleships the Navy has said would be the most expensive in its fleet, the formal renaming of the Defense Department as the Department of War and the administration’s Golden Dome missile shield.
Three days before last Christmas, President Trump stood between easels with renderings of futuristic, nuclear-armed warships that would be part of a new class of “Trump-class” battleships. In front of an antique Steinway baby grand piano in the gold-draped living room of his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, he said the ships would bristle with lasers, electromagnetic railguns and hypersonic missiles and would be built in “about two and a half years.” “There has never been anything built like them,” Trump said. Democrats on Capitol Hill hope there never is.
The warship is one of the Democrats’ prime targets in Trump’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request. Democrats are taking aim at the president’s pet projects amid an unpopular war with Iran and high prices at home, according to lawmakers. “We need an appropriate mix of high-end survivable systems and lower-cost attritable capabilities, not a fleet of nuclear-powered battleships as proposed by the president,” said Rep. Adam Smith (D., Wash.), the likely House Armed Services Committee chair next year.
The battleship has always had its critics. The Navy earlier this year said the first one would cost more than $17 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost $23 billion, with additional ships costing an average of $18 billion each. By comparison, the USS John F. Kennedy, the Ford-class aircraft carrier that the Navy is scheduled to receive next year, cost just over $13 billion. The Navy requested $1 billion to begin work on the battleship as part of the Pentagon’s standard $1.1 trillion request.
Those backing the new warship argue that the Navy’s existing Arleigh Burke-class destroyers don’t have the space for more missile-launching tubes and modern weapons, such as hypersonic and electronic weapons. “It looks like a big chipmunk with a mouthful of nuts right now because it’s so overburdened,” Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao told the House Armed Services Committee in May. “That’s why we need a large combatant.” The Navy had been in the early stages of considering a new, larger destroyer, but the battleship proposed by Trump is more than double the size and includes unproven railgun technology, using electricity to propel a projectile dozens of miles at up to seven times the speed of sound, that the Navy had previously abandoned.
Criticism from Democrats has been blunt. “This is the most expensive sitting duck in world history,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D., Mass.) said during a June hearing. “This battleship is a boondoggle. This vanity project is going to vanish.”
The Department of War renaming is another Democratic target. Administration officials have used the name since Trump signed an executive order in September 2025, and the change made it into both the House and Senate versions of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, legislation that has passed every year since the early 1960s. Democrats want that language stripped. Members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees now are working to create a unified version of the bill before the end of the year, with newly victorious Democrats using their leverage to demand that GOP negotiators pare back some provisions, like the departmental name change. Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on Tuesday called the name change “sophomoric.” “Anybody should be embarrassed to be associated with that,” he said.
Another one of the president’s top defense priorities, the “Golden Dome,” an elaborate missile-and-drone shield around the country that includes interceptors in space, also faces headwinds. Kaine has previously said the project could get “scoped,” but that senators would “work to find the funding and we’ll phase it in.” The project could also get a rebrand, said Tom Karako, a missile-defense expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He noted that many efforts to defend Guam, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific, and the U.S. mainland from cruise missiles were started during the Biden administration.
Complicating matters, the Pentagon has asked Congress to approve three separate defense spending packages that make up its $1.5 trillion request — a $1.1 trillion standard budget, a separate $350 billion reconciliation package and a $67 billion request to pay for the Iran war and National Guard deployments. Bundling the budget into different packages was seen as a way to make a large weapons investment while Republicans held control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Reconciliation needs a simple majority to pass the Senate, while a standard appropriations bill needs 60 votes, meaning it would need bipartisan support.
Hegseth, who has limited contact with Democrats since becoming defense secretary, now needs their support for his top priorities. “We’ve got civilian leaders and uniformed leaders up on Capitol Hill all the time,” Hegseth said during a Tuesday briefing at the Pentagon. Since Democrats’ midterm victories last week, Hegseth has upped his calls for Congress to pass the reconciliation package, which he said would make a “generational investment” to rebuild the military. “Not a single solitary Democrat is going to vote for that,” Smith said of reconciliation.
Some Republicans see complications as well. Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) said Hegseth being in charge at the Pentagon “absolutely” makes it harder to pass funding for the Iran war and Defense Department writ large. House Democrats on Tuesday failed to move forward on plans to impeach Hegseth in the lame duck session, but they are expected to try again next year when they are in the majority.
If lawmakers are unable to strike a budget deal, Pentagon spending could be frozen at under $900 billion under a yearlong continuing resolution that would prevent the military from spending money on new projects. Pentagon Comptroller Jules Hurst, a Trump administration official, said the department was working with congressional committees “on the best way to balance requirements between reconciliation and base funding.” “I’m not counting out that we can reach a deal—the appropriators are going to be looking for one,” Hurst said. “The appropriators have more practice at reaching compromise than any other committee in Congress.”
Some Pentagon priorities will find a friendly audience with the new majority. Hurst said officials were looking for ways to shift funding for critical efforts, such as munitions and Golden Dome, from the reconciliation package to the standard base budget. The Pentagon has depleted thousands of munitions since the beginning of the Iran war, but replenishing stockpiles has proven difficult. Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg has struck deals with several companies to buy thousands of munitions over the next seven years, but Congress has not approved any funding for most of those agreements.