House Republicans are planning to hike defense spending by $150 billion in the GOP’s budget bill, $50 billion more than the target originally set by the lower chamber in a win for defense hawks.
The GOP’s “one big beautiful” reconciliation bill, which will codify President Donald Trump‘s agenda on the economy, taxes, defense, and border security, is set to hit the floor by Memorial Day week. Committees tasked with sections of the megabill will be holding markups beginning as early as next week as Republicans battle within their ranks over spending cuts and how to extend the expiring tax cuts without increasing the deficit.
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The House Armed Services Committee is preparing for a markup on its portion of the legislation on Tuesday and will unveil a $150 billion increase in defense spending. The Senate’s budget resolution, a blueprint that passed both chambers to unlock the reconciliation process, called for $150 billion, but the House set a smaller goal of $100 billion.
However, senior congressional officials told reporters on Tuesday that House Republicans are now shooting for the higher figure. The funding will go to 12 key areas: shipbuilding, Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense program, nuclear weapons modernization, air superiority, border security, military intelligence, and Pacific deterrence.
While the defense funding has found some bicameral compromise, Medicaid is expected to be a tougher political challenge for Republicans.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee will likely face extreme scrutiny while building its section of the megabill as Republicans look to find $880 billion in cuts from the healthcare beneficiary programs under its umbrella.
Democrats have pointed to nonpartisan analyses that show slashes to Medicaid may be unavoidable in their quest to reach that level of spending reductions. But the GOP insists it would not cut benefits and instead would root out “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Officials said the draft text will be circulated to lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee by Wednesday afternoon and will be available to the public at the end of the day. The goal is to have a bill marked up and passed out of committee on Tuesday and sent to the Budget Committee, which will compile all of the sections for the reconciliation package that is set to hit the floor the week of May 19.
This puts Republicans on a very tight schedule, as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had set an ambitious goal to have the bill on Trump’s desk to be signed into law by Memorial Day.
Fiscal hawks could be an obstacle to final passage, warning that their support is contingent on leadership keeping their promises for deep spending cuts. They delayed a vote on the budget blueprint because they had not received concrete assurances on spending cuts from Johnson and Senate GOP leadership. The Senate had treated the House’s call for $1.5 trillion in cuts as an aspirational goal and set spending cuts at just $4 billion, a placeholder value.
After holding up the vote in mid-April, fiscal conservatives finally relented after talks with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), and the resolution was adopted with only two GOP dissenters.
One area of concern for House conservatives was the Senate’s use of an accounting method that assumes the extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from Trump’s first administration would not affect the deficit, lessening the need to find trillions in cuts elsewhere to pay for it.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) told the Washington Examiner that it’s a “mistake” to pressure the Memorial Day timeline. He said fiscal hawks are in favor of extending the tax cuts “so long as the spending cuts are riding along with them.”
“And if you can only achieve a little bit in spending cuts, then we’re going to have to be a little bit more thoughtful and modest about what we’re doing on the tax cuts, so that the math adds up,” Roy said.
Roy, the policy chairman for the Freedom Caucus, said he’s “not very keen” on the $150 billion increase in defense spending but would be open to it if Republicans found a way to offset it by freezing or lowering it in discretionary spending for fiscal 2026 appropriations.
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“Everyone in Washington literally lives by wanting to have their cake and eat it too,” Roy said. “They want tax cuts and they want to campaign on balanced budgets, but they don’t want to actually cut spending. They want to increase defense spending in mandatory and say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll figure that out and get the math to work out,’ but then they’ll never actually deliver on the mandatory side.”
Johnson can only lose three GOP lawmakers on a given piece of legislation to pass it along party lines, but that number could be flexible due to recent deaths and illnesses among Democrats in the House.