Kelly slams Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget request as outrageous

Mark Kelly on Sunday blasted Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense request as “outrageous,” putting a sharp congressional challenge to a budget plan that would drive military spending to a level never before seen in Washington. Kelly said the proposal was “nearly the amount that the rest of the world pays for its defense,” arguing that the scale itself has become the debate.

The request, set for fiscal year 2027 and first outlined by Trump on April 3, would ask Congress for $1.5 trillion in defense spending, a 42% increase, while cutting nondefense spending by $73 billion, or 10%. The Pentagon has described the package as the largest in history, and the comparison to recent budgets is stark. The 2026 military budget is set at $901 billion, while Kelly said the defense budget was “just over $700 billion” when he entered the Senate five and a half years ago.

Administration officials have defended the plan as a broad modernization push. They say it is meant to support service members, secure the homeland, rebuild the defense industrial base and raise pay for troops, while also investing in drones, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and next-generation warfare. That framing is central to the fight now unfolding on Capitol Hill: whether these outlays are the core of national security spending, or whether the Pentagon is using that label to justify a historic expansion at the expense of the rest of the federal budget.

The financing plan adds another layer of controversy. Pentagon officials are counting on Congress to pass a party-line reconciliation bill to cover a large share of the request, including major priorities such as Golden Dome, the F-35, munitions and unmanned systems. That approach would shift much of the burden onto a partisan budget vehicle while leaving fewer dollars for domestic priorities outside the Defense Department, reinforcing the argument that the request is not just about military readiness but about how Washington defines security spending in an era of trillion-dollar budgets.

Reaction in Congress has split along familiar lines, with Republicans generally welcoming the proposal and Democrats criticizing it. Kelly has also pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on how long it would take to replenish munitions stockpiles used in the war with Iran, underscoring the pressure the Pentagon faces to explain both the size of the request and the pace of its spending.