“I’m deeply concerned that the Presidential proposal for $350 billion mandatory funding [to be carried in a reconciliation bill and not an appropriations bill] for defense will have no Appropriations [Committee] input on the enactment. That’s not the right way to fund the Department of Defense, because it took the Department ten months to explain to Congress how they were going to spend the $150 billion in mandatory funding they received last year. It’s unacceptable, and I have no confidence the Department will do a better job responding to us in the future. There’s also no guarantee that a reconciliation bill will pass.”
That was Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) speaking last Wednesday at the House Appropriations Committee meeting that marked up the Fiscal Year 2027 Defense Appropriations Bill.
Ranking Democrat on the panel’s Defense Subcommittee, McCollum was questioning the Trump administration’s second year of seeking to put a major chunk of proposed defense spending in a reconciliation bill, where it could avoid both pre-passage congressional review and require only a majority vote for Senate approval.
It turned out that McCollum had bipartisan support for her view.
The House Appropriations Committee, in its report on the bill it later approved that day, included several examples of problems caused by using mandatory spending in a reconciliation bill, along with remedies it proposed..
I will discuss them below, along with one other critical issue – problems in U.S. Navy shipbuilding -- that the House committee also raised in its report.
Remember, however, these are just one committee’s suggestions and they still have a way to go to be adopted by the full House and Senate.
One mandatory spending example in the Committee report relates to the controversial F-35 Lightning joint fighter program.
The President’s fiscal year 2027 budget request includes $7 billion in discretionary funding for 32 F–35 aircraft and $10 billion in mandatory funding for 53 F–35s. Additional modernization funds sought for the F-35 program includes $2 billion in discretionary funding and $2.4 billion in mandatory funding.
In its report, the House Appropriations Committee said it “has serious concerns regarding how the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) bifurcated the funding request and questions the rigor that was used to split the request between discretionary and mandatory funding. For example, radars and other critical components were either funded in full on one side of the ledger
or the other, inconsistent with the total flyaway costs for discretionary and mandatory quantities.”
The Committee report continues, “Further, OMB made assumptions on program savings associated with executing a multi-year procurement contract, for which a corresponding legislative proposal has not been submitted, and applied all the savings to the discretionary request. As a result, the discretionary budget request actually procures a quantity of only six aircraft, rather than the 32 it purports to fund.”
Another Committee report example related to more than $43.4 billion for several critical munitions that is included in the $350 billion mandatory package. The committee said, “In many cases entering into MYP (multi-year procurement) contracts will require both discretionary and mandatory funds. The topic of accelerating munitions production has been a priority of the Department and Congress alike, though splitting funding into two funding processes could lead to incongruencies that will not be easily remedied.”
Splitting weapons programs between the discretionary and mandatory funding prevents Congress from considering requests as a whole, the Committee report says, thus preventing “effective oversight and program continuity and also to preserve production lines and commitments to industry partners and allies.”
The report adds that this year the House Committee is only considering the discretionary portion of the request, but will be “working with the [Defense] Department to ensure that budget justification materials submitted for fiscal year 2028 are adequate to evaluate the full-funding profile, regardless of funding mechanism or whether funding was previously enacted or provided in any future reconciliation package.”
The Appropriations panel report also directs attention to problems in the Navy’s shipbuilding program where the President’s fiscal 2027 budget request includes over $60 billion in discretionary funding for the Trump administration’s so-called Golden Fleet Initiative.
As the report puts it, “The Committee remains firm in its conviction that funding alone does not guarantee on-time delivery and is no substitute for sound program management and rigorous oversight. The Committee is concerned that an accelerated pace of investment, absent commensurate accountability, risks repeating the cost growth and schedule slips that have plagued nearly every major shipbuilding program in recent years.”
Getting specific, the report says, “The Committee is particularly troubled that the Navy’s cost-to-complete request for shipbuilding totals $2.6 billion in fiscal year 2027. The cumulative cost of these delays and overruns now rivals the price of the ships themselves, eroding the buying power of every dollar appropriated for new procurement. The Committee believes that the Navy has not consistently demonstrated the ability to identify, report, and correct adverse cost and schedule trends in a timely manner.”
For a remedy, the Committee “directs the Secretary of the Navy to submit a report to the House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees not later than 90 days after the enactment of this Act, and quarterly thereafter,” on each major shipbuilding program: to include the current delivery schedule, cost-to-complete with drivers of any growth; and actions the Navy has taken or intends to take to recover any schedule and contain cost growth.
The Committee report also directed the Government Accountability Office next year to assess any recurring cost growth and schedule delay across major Navy shipbuilding programs and the adequacy of the Navy’s response to identify and arrest such trends early.
The Committee also took aim at two specific submarine shipbuilding programs, starting with the Columbia-class which is the sea-based leg of the strategic nuclear triad, and the Virginia-class attack submarine.
According to the Committee report, “the lead Columbia-class submarine is delayed by as much as 18 months and that the Virginia-class program is delayed by as much as 42 months,” adding, “Delays of this magnitude present significant risk to strategic deterrence, erode undersea superiority, and degrade long-term operational availability and readiness.”
Because, according to the Committee report, “incremental funding in a constrained industrial environment serves only to introduce further risk,” the panel recommended “full funding for one Columbia-class submarine and two Virginia-class submarines.”
The House Committee report also took aim at the nascent Trump Guided Missile Battleship (BBG(X) program for which the President’s FY 2027 budget seeks $1 billion in advance procurement and $837 million in research and development funds.
The report says, “The Committee notes that the [Trump battleship] program has not finalized ship design, completed a formal analysis of alternatives, or established a stable set of requirements, and that the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the lead ship could cost in excess of $20 billion.”
The report added the Committee has cautioned in the past that “committing funding to construction before achieving design stability and solidifying requirements is a principal cause of the cost growth, schedule delay, and industrial base instability that afflict Navy shipbuilding.”
The Committee report also warned “that BBG(X), as a nuclear-powered surface vessel, will draw on the same finite pool of nuclear-capable shipyard capacity, skilled workforce, reactor components, and supplier base on which the Columbia-class submarine, Virginia-class submarine, and Ford-class aircraft carrier programs depend.”
Given the situation, the Committee said that “introducing a new nuclear surface combatant [the BBG(X)] without careful planning could compound those constraints and place at risk the delivery of [shipbuilding] programs the Committee considers higher priorities for the nuclear-capable industrial base.”
As a result, the Committee requested detailed reports from the Navy Secretary: One that “addresses the validated requirements and key performance parameters for the large surface combatant [BBG(X)]; the status of the analysis of alternatives and ship design, including a design maturity assessment and the criteria the Navy will use to certify design stability prior to any commitment to lead-ship construction.”
And a second report that deals with the “Navy’s strategy to design and construct BBG(X) without interfering with existing nuclear-powered shipbuilding programs,” and also “how the Navy will sequence and resource BBG(X) so as not to jeopardize the delivery schedules of those programs.”
If that were not enough, the Committee also added a section to the actual legislation, Section 8147, which, by law, would limit the Department of the Navy from using funds to contract to build the lead ship of the Trump-class battleship program, BBG(X), until the “Secretary of the Navy certifies to the congressional defense committees that the weapon systems planned for inclusion in such lead ship are at a sufficiently mature technology readiness level.”
In a column last April, I noted some weapons Trump wants to include on BBG(X) are still in development and any design for such a ship was at least two years away. I now repeat what I wrote two months ago, my bet is that none of these Trump-class battleships will ever actually be built.
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