What is going on with the FY 2026 DoD Budget?

Even by the standards of presidential transition years, the FY 2026 budget request is late and getting more rather than less clear

According to the legislation governing the budget process, the President’s Budget Request for the next Fiscal Year is supposed to be released in early February. This happens inconsistently, at best, but as it’s not early June and the budget remains stubbornly unreleased, I wanted to write for a bit about what’s come out so far and why it’s problematic from an analysis perspective.

Typically the Department of Defense’s budget request is released rapidly after the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) releases its documentation. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the documentation can be found here. On May 2nd of this year, the White House and OMB released their budget (available here). No details followed.

The budget request provided topline totals for agencies and highlighted that while President Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth had talked up a $1 trillion defense topline, it was accomplished through what amounts to an asterisk. The “base” budget for national defense (which is inclusive of spending beyond DoD, though DoD gets ~95% of it) was over $1 trillion, but only because the budget included funding from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB going forward) being worked on in Congress. In practice, it actually only provided level spending for national defense with FY 2025. Even more oddly, while the version of the OBBB before Congress included $150 billion in defense spending, the budget request only included $119 billion.

However, it was reasonable to expect that this would be cleared up when budget details were released.

Only, then they weren’t. Last Friday - May 30 - OMB released account level spending detail in an Appendix. Then, this past week, they released a detailed DoD appendix that appears to have different totals.

Of the two, the most recent material seems to be more comprehensive but it’s entirely unclear how to account for the difference between the two documents. Nor do we yet have the detailed material that comes out annually to help identify more specific programmatic priorities. It’s now four months beyond the expected timeline and there is still no announced date for the full release. Based on the way OMB has been secreting out material in Friday night news dumps, I am skeptical that will change.