Trump Wants to Scale Up Munitions Production, But Congress Hasn’t Yet Funded It

Four months ago, President Donald Trump emerged from a White House meeting with America’s largest weapons makers with a big promise: The companies had agreed to quadruple production of some of America’s most important missiles, and the ramp-up had already begun.

Last week at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, he floated an ambitious timeline: Delivery schedules that now stretch for a year or two could shrink to as little as one week in the next 12 to 18 months. Whether that’s attainable is unclear, but the problem Trump described was real.

“Our equipment works, but we have to produce it faster for other countries, for everybody, including ourselves,” Trump said. “A lot of people are just waiting.”

Making good on those promises still hinges on the Pentagon turning more of its unfinished deals with the defense industry into contracts. But more importantly, it requires securing tens of billions of dollars from a Congress that has yet to fund much of the buildup.

When lawmakers return from recess on Monday, the pressure will be on House Speaker Mike Johnson to deliver on his pledge to advance another party-line reconciliation bill — legislation the Pentagon says it’s counting on to finance much of its munitions surge. It will be up to the House Budget Committee to begin the process of drafting a bill.

The Pentagon has been making its case publicly. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, posted on X last week that a deal with RTX for Tomahawk missiles depends in part on the company putting up some of its own money to invest in technology, workers and facilities, and he urged Congress to pass Trump’s proposed $350 billion reconciliation package.

“But to keep this momentum going, we need the funds to execute,” Parnell wrote.

The defense industry is making the same case. Michael Herson, the president and CEO of the American Defense International lobbying firm, said the industry sees reconciliation as the most viable route to the full-scale funding it’s seeking. The regular appropriations bill and the administration’s emergency supplemental spending request related to the Iran war, he said, are likely to be stalled.

“The money in the reconciliation bill is absolutely critical,” Herson told NOTUS. Without it, he said, the administration’s plans to expand munitions production “go out the window.”

The Pentagon’s 2027 budget request seeks nearly $53 billion for 14 weapons prioritized by its Munitions Acceleration Council, an initiative aimed at ramping up production of missiles considered especially important for current conflicts and a possible future war against a major power.

A large share of the money for scaling up manufacturing sits outside the regular defense budget and instead depends on Congress passing a reconciliation package that some top lawmakers see as unlikely to become law.

The administration wants defense firms to invest in plants, tooling, workers and suppliers in return for predictable orders extending five to seven years into the future. But while the Pentagon has announced several splashy framework agreements to that effect, those aren’t actual contracts.

Under the framework agreements, the government can signal how much it wants to buy over time, and the companies can commit to the investments needed to ramp up production. But the government cannot promise money Congress hasn’t appropriated, and contracts cannot be signed until they’re backed by congressional funding.

“The ultimate demand signal for a company is a contract,” said Jerry McGinn, the executive director of the Center for the Industrial Base at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Defense companies have been reticent in the past about making big investments in new factories or hiring workers, because they’ve repeatedly watched munitions orders rise and fall over the years, sometimes by as much as 50% from one year to the next, McGinn said. America’s largest defense firms, which are publicly traded, also must justify major investments to shareholders.

There has been some progress. Some companies are expanding investments in factories and equipment, and some preliminary agreements have advanced into contract actions. Lockheed Martin has pledged billions in investments across more than 20 facilities, while RTX has signed framework agreements setting annual production goals of more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles and at least 1,900 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles.

Still, there’s a substantial gap between the Pentagon’s ambitions and what’s been completed.

“Of the many prioritized munitions, we saw a bunch of press releases in January and February, and to date, there’s been exactly two contract announcements,” said Tom Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Those two actions, for Patriot Advanced Capability-3 and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors, involve enormous sums but remain what are known as undefinitized contract actions, or UCAs. They allow work to begin before the government and contractor finish negotiating final terms and pricing. Such agreements get production moving faster, but they’re still short of fully negotiated contracts.

“The reason we are not seeing more and we’re not seeing the contracts locked down is that they don’t have the money,” Karako said.

Late in the fiscal 2026 appropriations process, the Pentagon sought authority and funding for up to $28.8 billion in multiyear munitions purchases. Appropriators said the request arrived too late in the process, and Congress ultimately authorized eight multiyear procurements but did not provide anything close to the full amount the Pentagon sought.

In its 2027 budget, the Pentagon split funding for its multiyear munitions purchases between regular appropriations and a separate mandatory spending package. House appropriators said more than $43.4 billion in mandatory funding was tied to the critical munitions effort.

The Appropriations Committee blasted that approach as “risky and uncoordinated,” saying the process was out of sync with the annual appropriations cycle and being used to fund critical programs that should have been included in the base budget.

“They put almost everything in reconciliation, and that’s what makes it a gamble,” Karako said.

The White House budget director, Russ Vought, has argued that the party-line reconciliation process lets Republicans boost defense spending without needing votes from Democrats, who typically demand matching increases on the nondefense side of the budget.

Wall Street has raised doubts about the path through Congress in an election year. Matt Akers, a senior aerospace and defense equity research analyst at BNP Paribas, estimated that 57% of the Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 missile and missile defense procurement request overall is tied to reconciliation.

And some of the most important weapons are even more dependent on reconciliation. Akers estimates that 90% of PAC-3 funding, 88% of AMRAAM funding, 84% of THAAD funding, 74% of Standard Missile-6 funding and 66% of Tomahawk funding are part of the reconciliation request.

Akers expects little progress on even regular defense appropriations before the November midterm elections and considers it unlikely that a reconciliation package including defense spending would pass before then, though a deal in the lame-duck session could be possible.

Even if lawmakers eventually approve the broader buildup, delays in regular appropriations could slow it down.

Akers warned that a prolonged continuing resolution — a stopgap that keeps the government funded at existing levels — could hold up production increases.

The production push is fueled by the speed with which the U.S. military would burn through its stockpiles in a potential future war with China, and now, replacing weapons used against Iran.

Becca Wasser, a defense analyst at Bloomberg who has run war games involving a conflict with China over Taiwan, said several of the Pentagon’s priority weapons are consumed rapidly in those scenarios. Anti-ship missiles are critical for attacking an invasion fleet, while Tomahawks provide long-range strike options against land targets.

At the same time, some of those same weapons are being drained in the conflict with Iran. “The rate of strikes is definitely not keeping pace with the rate of munitions production,” she said.

The U.S. already had finite stocks before the Iran war. Now the Pentagon is trying to solve two problems at once: replace weapons used in combat and build inventories larger than previous ones.

“Right now, there is this need to replenish a great deal of U.S. stockpiles that were already not enough, and the high expenditure rates of the Iran war have really reinforced the need,” Wasser said. “That’s something the administration has made a priority since Day One, but that hasn’t necessarily been enough to lead them to use some of these high-demand munitions judiciously.”