The Senate’s top Armed Services Republican eviscerated President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) shortly after the White House released details of its government funding proposal for fiscal year 2026.
“President Trump successfully campaigned on a Peace Through Strength agenda, but his advisers at the Office of Management and Budget were apparently not listening,” Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said in a statement.
“The Big, Beautiful Reconciliation Bill was always meant to change fundamentally the direction of the Pentagon on programs like Golden Dome, border support, and unmanned capabilities – not to paper over OMB’s intent to shred to the bone our military capabilities and our support to service members.
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Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., tore into OMB for the Trump budget. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images.)
The Trump OMB’s “skinny budget,” released on Friday, proposes cuts to non-defense funding by $163 billion but increases defense funding from $893 billion to $1.01 trillion – a 13% increase. That includes $892.6 billion in discretionary spending, but will be supplemented by $119.3 billion in mandatory spending that is expected to be passed in the upcoming reconciliation bill.
Senior officials told Fox News the Trump administration needed to get creative to get a $1 trillion-plus budget over the finish line: Republican majorities have historically been forced to offer one-to-one increases in non-defense spending to secure increases in defense spending.
However, by keeping discretionary defense spending at $892.6 billion, the same level as fiscal year 2025, the budget that would be presented to Democrats would essentially reflect an unchanged defense discretionary budget with a smaller non-defense discretionary budget of about $557 billion – a 22.6% decrease.
The White House and congressional Republicans would…
