How SASC, HASC want to spend reconciliation on Golden Dome, munitions

WASHINGTON — The House and Senate Armed Services Committees have sent the Pentagon guidance for how lawmakers want to see $150 billion in defense funding from the reconciliation bill spent, providing new details on which programs stand to benefit from the added money.

The Pentagon has until Aug. 22 to provide its own implementation plan laying out whether it will follow the committees’ recommendations, wrote HASC Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and SASC Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., in a July 22 letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“To inform the development of such plan, the committees are attaching guidance outlining the intended appropriations,” Rogers and Wicker wrote in the letter. “We value your partnership and look forward to working with you on modernizing our military, enhancing our defense industrial base and building a ready, capable and lethal fighting force that will deter America’s adversaries.”

While funding for many big ticket items—like two additional Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and a boost for F-15EX fighter procurement — was apparent in the reconciliation bill, which was signed into law on July 4, other funding lines were tied to broad categories, such as “counter-unmanned aerial systems programs,” rather than specific programs.

The committees’ funding guidance includes more granular spending information for those programs for the first time. The funding tables also reveal a list of key missile defense programs potentially slated to receive a funding increase as part of the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile shield program.

Over the past three months, Wicker has repeatedly asked defense officials, including Hegseth, to promise to spend the reconciliation money in accordance with congressional guidance. Hegseth and others have provided such a commitment.

Inside Defense was the first to report on the documents.

Golden Dome Details 

The congressional plan provides a more granular look at what Missile Defense Agency (MDA) programs are getting funding infusions related to the Trump administration’s ambitious Golden Dome initiative. 

For example, while the reconciliation bill text shows $2.2 billion under Section 20003 for “accelerated hypersonic defense systems,” the implementation plan notes that these funds are all slated for the Glide Phase Interceptor. 

Likewise, the $800 million in the bill “for accelerated development and deployment of next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile defense systems” is to be injected into the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) program. Lawmakers further specified that $60 million of those funds be used for a test of the NGI’s ability to take out an incoming missile in its midcourse. 

The document also includes specific instructions to the agency to slate the $65 million in the reconciliation package’s section on munitions (Section 20004) for “expansion of production capacity of Missile Defense Agency long-range anti-ballistic missile” towards ramping up the production capacity for the Standard Missile-3 Block IIA to 36 a year. 

For each of these efforts, lawmakers also demand that MDA provide a plan for spending the allotted funds. 

Air Force And Army

While the reconciliation bill itself already laid out funding boosts for high-profile Air Force programs like the B-21 Raider and LGM-35A Sentinel ICBM, which would receive cash infusions of $4.5 billion and $2.5 billion respectively, the spending plan does include more specific detail for spending targets. 

For example, an additional $1.5 billion for low-cost cruise missiles would be divvied up by providing $745 million for the Family of Affordable Mass Missile palletized munition, $500 million for the Extended Range Attack Munition developed for Ukraine and $30 million to accelerate a small cruise missile for special forces, among other projects. 

The spending plan also provides more insight into how lawmakers and the DoD intend to supercharge munitions production, a key focus of the reconciliation process amid stiff demand for ordnance. 

The ship-killing LRASM, which would get a plus-up of $400 million, would be divided between $288 million for the Navy and $112 million for the Air Force, amounting to a total of 240 rounds in FY26, according to the spending plan. And in expanding production of the AMRAAM air-to-air missile, the spending plan says the weapon’s 120D variant “has a significant backlog only likely to grow” due to foreign demand and the fielding of Collaborative Combat Aircraft drone wingmen, which are expected to serve as AMRAAM trucks.

Meanwhile, lawmakers directed that reconciliation funds be used to reverse cuts on several development programs announced by the Army Transformation Initiative.

For example, the service had announced tentative plans to end development of a new engine for UH-60 Black Hawks and AH-64 Apaches by General Electric dubbed the Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP). However, authorizers detail the expectation that $63 million will be used to keep the development program afloat.

In May, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus said that such an add might be enough to keep ITEP going short term.

“We know that the Army will benefit from reconciliation, but just how much is unknown,” the four-star general told reporters at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference in Nashville, Tenn.

“The future of ITEP is largely going to depend on where all these things land inside the ‘26 budget,” he later added.

The committees also want to see $92.5 million spent to allow the service to complete prototyping of its Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program. 

Breaking Defense first reported in early March that industry sources had been notified that Textron Systems’s Ripsaw 3 had won the RCV competition and the service was preparing to ink a deal with the victors. But around that same time, Army leaders identified RCV as one program to cut as part of the 8 percent budget drill to realign funding toward higher priorities, one service official told Breaking Defense in May.

As a result, the service is preparing to halt work on the program, though it is unclear just what impact the reconciliation dollars will have.

In other ground vehicle moves, lawmakers want the service to send an additional $250 million to buy 38 additional Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPVs) from BAE Systems. As part of the new ATI, the service was planning to simply keep the AMPV production line warm. 

Meanwhile, lawmakers are also eyeing a one year acceleration to the Army’s Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) Increment 4 with an $85 million investment in long-lead items. In 2023, the service tapped two teams, one led by Lockheed Martin and one led by Raytheon and Northop Grumman, to work on competing PrSM Inc 4 designs for a weapon that can fly more than 1,000 km.

The bill is also intended to provide the service with $4.5 million to spend on Anduril’s Roadrunner-Munition which contains a high-explosive interceptor meant to destroy an array of aerial threats, from a smaller Iranian Shahed loitering munition — which have been terrorizing Ukraine — to aircraft up to “full-sized” aircraft.