WASHINGTON — Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are resisting President Donald Trump’s calls to raise the Pentagon’s budget to its highest level in modern history, signaling a looming fight over military spending as the administration refuses to detail the cost of the war with Iran.

Even as Trump tries to wind down the conflict, he and his administration are pressing Republicans to steer around Democratic opposition and push through $350 billion in military spending using a special budget bill that could not be filibustered. That would cover only a fraction of the $1.5 trillion military budget he has requested for next year.

But some Republicans have taken exception to the idea, openly saying they do not think their party will be able to muster the near-unanimous support that would be needed to muscle through the measure. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth privately met with GOP senators at the Capitol this week in an effort to shore up support for such an effort.

At the same time, Democrats’ antipathy toward the war with Iran has prompted many of them to oppose the annual defense policy bill that authorizes the Pentagon’s vast budget, which senators have long tried to preserve as an overwhelmingly bipartisan measure. All but four Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee last week opposed approving the bill, resulting in a lopsided vote tally that once would have been unheard-of.

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a member of the panel, said he opposed the bill because the Trump administration had not answered critical questions about the war with Iran, including “whether the mission makes sense, makes us safer and what it’s going to cost.”

“We cannot write them another blank check,” Kelly, a Navy combat veteran, said.

The reluctance to push through the spending legislation Trump has insisted upon represents something of a departure from business as usual on Capitol Hill. Bipartisan consensus around funding the military is usually quickly forged by the hawkish lawmakers who dominate Congress’ national security committees.

Republican leaders puzzling over how to quickly furnish Trump with the military funding he has requested have continued to hit roadblocks. For weeks, senior GOP lawmakers have been agitating for the administration to send Congress a supplemental funding request to cover the costs of the war in Iran — a standard step when U.S. forces are involved in a military operation, but one that the White House has so far been unwilling to take.

The Pentagon had initially sought $200 billion in additional funding for the conflict, though the White House was later rumored to be considering scaling back that number. The uncertainty has prompted concern among top lawmakers.

“I’ve been surprised that the administration hasn’t sent a supplemental yet,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, told reporters last month.

But politically vulnerable Republicans are loath to support an expensive military spending bill in the run-up to what is expected to be a brutal midterm cycle for their party. And any such measure would need to win bipartisan support to advance in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to do so.

Democrats say they will take any opportunity to repudiate the Iran war, and will not support increasing military spending while Trump wages war without congressional approval, refuses to account for the costs of the conflict and slashes domestic programs.

“This is a validation of a war that we shouldn’t be in,” said Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt. “It’s a validation of Trump’s duplicity, where he claims he won’t get us into wars and gets us into wars — and is potentially planning another one in Cuba.”

The Democratic opposition is one reason that the administration and some Republicans in Congress have begun considering using a filibusterproof budget process known as reconciliation to push through new military funding. Even that idea, which Trump has lobbied for, has its complications.

“You’ve got to have something that gets 50 and 218,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the majority leader, told reporters, referring to the bare-minimum majority votes that would be needed to pass such legislation in the Senate and House. “I’m not sure exactly at this point what that is.”

Some conservative Republicans would almost certainly insist upon attaching unrelated, divisive measures to the legislation that could sap critical support from more moderate Republicans in the Senate. And GOP defense hawks have objected to the maneuver because it would shift money for initiatives they support to a bill that would be enacted on a one-time basis, rather than enshrining it in annual appropriations in a more lasting way.

Two Republican senators who control the Pentagon’s funding levels — Collins and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the chair of the Appropriations Committee’s defense panel — have said they would prefer to fund military priorities through the normal appropriations process.

Hegseth’s message to Senate Republicans, said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who also met with him at the Capitol this week, was that the Pentagon was “running short on funding they need in order to acquire the weapons and missiles and things like that that they need to protect the nation.”

The marquee tax legislation Republicans passed in 2025 using the reconciliation process provided the Pentagon with $150 billion in new funding.

A top Pentagon official testified last month that the war with Iran had cost around $29 billion to that point. That estimate, however, did not include a number of costs the United States will have to bear associated with the hostilities, including repairing more than a dozen U.S. military bases damaged by Iranian attacks.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Catie Edmondson/Tierney L. Cross
c. 2026 The New York Times Company