Senate passes $839B defense spending bill, kicking new agreement back to the House

WASHINGTON — The Senate passed the $838.7 billion fiscal 2026 defense spending bill today, after Democrats and the White House reached a deal to largely avert a government shutdown.

Senators voted 71-29 to approve the funding package, which includes full-year appropriations for the Pentagon as well as five other departments. As per the terms of the deal, full-year funding for the Department of Homeland Security was replaced by a two-week continuing resolution in the wake of the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents last week.

Federal funding for the Defense Department expires at midnight, meaning there will be an expected lapse over the weekend until the House passes the latest version of the spending agreement. House members are scheduled to return to Washington on Monday.

Earlier today, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries demurred when asked whether House Democrats would support the funding package and DHS CR.

“There’s no agreement that’s been before us,” he said during a news conference. “The Senate has to do its thing before we have anything to evaluate, but I’m going to remain in close contact with [Senate Minority] Leader [Chuck] Schumer, and hopefully they’ll get something done today.”

Last week, the House voted 341-88 to advance a bipartisan funding package that contained funding for defense, health and human services and other departments. A separate vote was held for DHS appropriations, which narrowly passed with support from only seven Democrats.

House GOP leaders opted to combine the funding package with the DHS bill before sending it to the Senate — a tactic meant to guarantee the 60 votes needed for passage by bundling Democrat priorities with the DHS bill. However, that tactic backfired after Pretti’s death galvanized Senate Democrats, who said that they would not vote to approve a full year DHS funding bill.

For more on the FY26 defense appropriations bill, click here.

Despite the political turmoil surrounding the funding package, the contents of the defense bill are largely uncontroversial. The FY26 defense appropriations bill contains $8.4 billion more than the Pentagon’s budget request issued last summer.

However, because the department has added more than $50 billion in additional funding requests since then, the Pentagon will still be short some of the money it wants for FY26.

Those additional requests include $26.5 billion to mitigate funding discrepancies between its FY26 request and the reconciliation bill — essentially a laundry list of accounting errors that resulted in shortfalls to key programs like the Virginia-class submarine, some of which were addressed by the additional $8 billion increase.

The late requests also included an additional $2.3 billion in “emergent requirements” and a whopping $28.8 billion sum for multiyear munitions procurement contracts, which largely went unfunded.

In other big moves, contrary to the White House’s stance, lawmakers added $897 million to the Navy’s F/A-XX program and directed the service to award a contract for the engineering, manufacturing and development phase of the sixth-generation fighter. The bill also provides $1.1 billion to continue the E-7 Wedgetail program, which the Air Force wanted to cancel.

The spending bill rejects the Army’s agile funding proposal and adds about $300 million to the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program, despite the service’s call to end the program.

The White House expressed its support of the budget deal in a statement of administration policy released Thursday, stating that the defense bill makes “critical investments in lethality” and would revitalize US shipbuilding.

“Further, it provides multiyear procurement authority for certain critical munitions,” the White House said in the statement. “The Administration appreciates this provision and looks forward to continuing to work with the Congress moving forward to ensure that critical munitions needs are met.”