Hegseth’s Defense Spending Pitch Leaves House GOP Without A Clear Path

The Trump administration on Wednesday sent Congress an $87.6 billion emergency spending request, officially teeing up the fight over how to fund the Iran war and broader Pentagon needs as Republicans remain divided over defense spending.

The supplemental request calls for $67 billion for the Pentagon, including operational costs for Operation Epic Fury, rebuilding weapons stockpiles, readiness, fuel, drones and classified programs. It also includes billions for farmers, Ebola response, Coast Guard operations, Penn Station renovations in New York and construction projects in Washington.

The White House request, sent by budget director Russell Vought to House Speaker Mike Johnson, frames most of the funding as tied to Operation Epic Fury. Vought wrote that the war “massively” degraded Iran’s ability to project power.

The Pentagon portion includes $21 billion for munitions, $12 billion for other classified programs, $17 billion for operations costs, $5 billion for cybersecurity and more than $2 billion for drones.

But there are major political hurdles to clear before the measure can be passed. Democrats, who are unlikely to provide the votes in the Senate that the legislation needs, immediately lashed out.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she would examine the request but “not rubberstamp tens of billions more for this disastrous war of choice.” She also blasted the inclusion of Pentagon expenses that didn’t appear urgent.

“This request is not merely meant to pay for the president’s disastrous war,” Murray said in a statement, “but an attempt to secure tens of billions of additional dollars for unrelated Pentagon priorities that should rightly be considered through the annual appropriations process.”

House Republicans could try to fold the supplemental funding request into a party-line reconciliation bill — a route that would require near-total unity from a caucus with a narrow majority and divisions over how deeply to cut domestic programs to pay for increased Pentagon spending. The administration’s broader $1.5 trillion Pentagon spending request for 2027 is split between more than $1 trillion through regular spending bills and $350 billion through reconciliation.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with House Republicans just before the supplemental request was transmitted, in an attempt to unify defense hawks and fiscal hawks behind the administration’s spending requests.

Emerging from a classified briefing for the Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus of House conservatives, lawmakers still appeared far from agreement over how deeply to cut non-defense spending in a reconciliation bill to pay for any defense boost. Instead, several lawmakers made clear what they needed to see from the administration before pledging their support.

“I want to see the package first, and the pay-fors,” said Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas).

The politics of cutting safety-net programs popular with many voters are treacherous for front-line Republicans, especially moderates, ahead of November’s midterm elections. But not all Republicans demanded deep cuts before committing to the Pentagon funding.

Rep. Carlos Gimenez — a Republican from Florida, home to 5.2 million Medicaid recipients — appeared sensitive to making deep cuts to programs and said he wants what he called “easy” reductions to “things that are non-essential and are wasteful spending.”

Cuts, he added, were not a prerequisite for new defense spending. “The security of the United States is foremost in my mind, and we have to spend what we have to spend in order to secure the United States,” he told NOTUS.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) said he backed the Pentagon’s push to increase defense spending, but would not vote for a defense-heavy reconciliation bill until there’s a plan to replace 5,000 troops Hegseth pulled back from Eastern Europe.

“He made an effective case down there, and I support it,” Bacon said of Hegseth. “That said, there are other things that we’re looking for too. … If you want my vote, you’d better replace that brigade in Poland.”

With the bipartisan unpopularity of the Iran war as a backdrop, Rep. Kevin Kiley, an independent from California who caucuses with House Republicans, told reporters reconciliation wasn’t a prudent avenue for achieving the defense spending goals.

“Especially when we are talking about issues of national security and defense, we’ll get better policy if we do it in a bipartisan way,” Kiley said.

For all the talk of roadblocks and hurdles, at least one Republican lawmaker says the short-term noise is likely to give way to voting success down the line.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), a conservative fiscal hawk who said he had questions about the Pentagon’s plans to pass an audit, predicted to NOTUS after the briefing that fellow Republicans will acquiesce after Hegseth was “persuasive.”

“They’re gonna talk tough,” Burchett said of the party’s holdouts on Iran funding. “But most of them are going to roll. They’re already on board.”

This story updated to include additional reporting.