WASHINGTON — The fiscal 2027 budget season has barely started, but the head of the House Armed Services Committee is setting two major goals for the year: securing $450 billion for defense in an upcoming reconciliation bill, and using the next defense policy bill to expand the defense industrial base.
In an exclusive interview with Breaking Defense, HASC Chairman Mike Rogers said that he is working with his Senate counterpart, Sen. Roger Wicker, to lock that funding in.
“We’ve informed our leadership of that,” he said Wednesday. “We’re not talking about something frivolous here. We’re talking about national defense.”
That $450 billion would be three times the $150 billion secured for defense in last year’s reconciliation effort — which itself represented the first time defense money was secured through the reconciliation procedure. However, Rogers argued that the funding would be necessary to achieve the target, laid down by President Donald Trump, of a $1.5 trillion defense budget for FY27.
Rogers explained his math thusly: If the White House requests a budget equivalent to last year’s, at about $1.03 trillion, and rolls over the $20 billion left over from last year’s reconciliation bill, that leaves a gap of about $450 billion to hit $1.5 trillion.
And while appropriators have final say on defense spending during the normal budget process, authorizers, such as Rogers, have control in reconciliation.
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However, getting $450 billion in defense spending into a reconciliation bill and passed into law could be an uphill battle.
While Republicans are able to pass a reconciliation bill without help from Democrat votes, they will face tight margins and a narrow timeframe for doing so, as Democrats are projected to take back the House in the upcoming midterm elections. And securing Republican support for additional defense funding in reconciliation is not a given: A recent blueprint for the second reconciliation bill put out by the House Republican Study Committee did not list defense among other priority areas such as home ownership and health care.
However, Rogers stressed that a $1.5 trillion defense budget is necessary to be able to pay for major modernization projects including the Golden Dome missile shield, sixth-generation F-47 fighter jet, and Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program.
“We have all these big ticket items that we have to do, and you can’t do that on a trillion-dollar budget. You just can’t,” he said. “So that’s the sobering side of the story that I think we’re going to be able to offer to our colleagues when it comes to getting the votes to do this.”
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Meanwhile, HASC has already begun early work on the FY27 National Defense Authorization Act, which will prioritize the expansion of the defense industrial base, Rogers said.
“We tilled the soil last year by trying to improve acquisition processes to make it more commercial, so that it’s easier for industry to work with the government,” he said. “That was on purpose, because we do have to expand the defense industrial base. It’s gotten very small, and it’s atrophied, and it needs a lot of attention.”
Following the end of the Cold War, the defense industry narrowed to just six prime contractors, after the infamous Last Supper meeting in 1993 where Pentagon leaders told defense executives to consolidate or risk going out of business.
Over the past decade, the industrial base has grown, as venture capital-backed defense tech startups like Anduril and Palantir entered the scene. But Rogers said he would like to see a larger number of commercial companies start making products for the Defense Department.
“That’s our question to these folks, and we’ve already started bringing them in and asking them, ‘What can we do to incentivize you to get into the defense production?’” he said. “Taking the traditionals and non-traditionals, what can we do to incentivize you to grow? [For] the primes, what can we do to incentivize you to expand?
HASC still is in its early stages of understanding the problem and doesn’t have “preconceived ideas” about exactly what legislative steps may need to be taken to widen the aperture for new entrants to the defense sector, Rogers said.
“I don’t know what all the obstacles are going to be,” he said. “I’m expecting some of them may be outside our jurisdiction. For example, tax policy. There may be something about our tax structure that disincentivizes expansion. If so, let us know so we can work with our counterparts on the Ways and Means Committee to address that.”