{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ID=D36972AC-2283-4723-9C5A-A2D1E82583F0", "McConnell Opening Statement at SAC-D Hearing on FY 26 Budget Request for the Department of Defense", "2025-06-11", "2025", "2025-06", "Republican", "Senate", "KY", "Mitch McConnell", "M000355", "www.mcconnell.senate.gov", "mcconnell", "https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases", "scraper", "Washington, D.C. \u2013 U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, convened today\u2019s hearing \u201cA Review of the President\u2019s Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request for the Department of Defense\u201d. Prepared text of his opening statement follows:\n\n\u201cSecretary Hegseth, General Caine, Ms. MacDonnell, welcome. My colleagues and I are looking forward to your candid testimony.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s no doubt that the global threat environment demands from us an uncompromisingly lethal force. And your efforts over recent months to renew the Department\u2019s focus on lethality \u2013 and your attention to the concerns of servicemembers at the tip of the spear \u2013 are worthwhile and appreciated.\n\n\u201cOf course, sustaining this shift requires a clear strategy and adequate investments in capabilities. So we\u2019re looking forward to hearing, in detail: What, exactly, the Office of Management and Budget is requesting on behalf of the Department of Defense for the coming fiscal year\u2026And whether this budget flows from a strategy or instead defines and limits a strategy.\n\n\u201cThis hearing will be the first public demonstration of what we hope to be a productive relationship between the Subcommittee and the Department. In the past, this relationship has functioned best when it\u2019s been based on timely and forthcoming communication.\n\n\u201cLast year, details from the Department and the services about their growing requirements informed the Subcommittee\u2019s efforts to mark up a bill to provide the military with $18.8 billion in resources above President Biden\u2019s FY25 request. But that didn\u2019t become law. Regrettably, the CR we\u2019re under right now was yet another missed opportunity that compounded the constraints facing the Department today.\n\n\u201cOn this subcommittee, you\u2019ll find plenty of support for the Department\u2019s efforts to \u2013 for example \u2013 improve air and missile defense systems, grow the pipeline for unmanned technologies, modernize our nuclear triad, and expand shipbuilding capacity. But lumping reconciliation spending in with full-year appropriations risks conflating different objectives. Chairman Wicker and his House counterpart have pointed out already that even an important, one-time investment in military modernization is not a substitute for steady growth in the annual budget topline. In fact, it may well end up functioning as a shell-game to avoid making the most significant annual investments that we spent years urging the Biden Administration to make.\n\n\u201cI struggle to understand why the Administration would cut procurement funding in the base FY26 budget by $14.4B and move funding for programs that have strong bipartisan support to a simple-majority reconciliation bill. The FY26 annual request seems to do just this for Virginia class submarines, Arleigh Burke class destroyers, and B-21 bombers. Like with critical munitions, we should send the Services and industry a sustained demand signal by incorporating them into annual appropriations.\n\n\u201cIf we\u2019re really serious about making the sustained, long-term investments in our military, then let\u2019s do more than a one-time injection of funding. If the Administration wants to request a trillion-dollar defense budget for FY26 and make a full-year investment in urgent priorities and new programs, they ought to do it.\n\n\u201cIn the meantime, let\u2019s not overstate the FY26 request. The Administration\u2019s requested base defense budget is lower than fifteen of the last twenty annual requests\u2026including President Biden\u2019s request for FY25. In fact, FY26 extends your predecessors\u2019 streak to five straight base budget requests that would fail to keep pace with inflation \u2013 let alone with the pacing threat of China. But say we do take reconciliation into account. Even then, this is hardly the largest funding request for the Department of Defense.\n\n\u201cIn constant dollars, the FY26 Department of Defense budget request still falls short of the annual funding requests from FY08, FY09, FY10, and FY11. As a share of GDP, even including reconciliation, the FY26 request is still just around 3%. That\u2019s not just half the level of the Reagan buildup that secured peace through strength\u2026 it\u2019s even less than the 4.5% of GDP requested for defense under President Carter.\n\n\u201cWhy should we expect our allies to spend 5% of GDP on defense if we\u2019re investing barely half that share? The failure to spend more on defense is compounded by another dynamic. Every year, a greater share of the defense budget goes to cover costs other than modernizing and procuring new weapons and equipment for our fighting forces.\n\n\u201cWithout additional resources, rising Personnel and Operations & Maintenance costs risk crowding out new capabilities. How we allocate taxpayer dollars is an expression of our political will. We can\u2019t expect our adversaries to take American hard power seriously if we don\u2019t put our money where our mouth is. But as I mentioned, we\u2019re also interested in your articulation of the strategy that informs \u2013 or is informed by \u2013 the Administration\u2019s budget. How does that strategy account for adversary alignment? How does it address not only the threat of conflict in the Indo-Pacific, but the reality of conflict and military threats to our interests in Europe and the Middle East?\n\n\u201cMost of us on this panel believe that Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, its alignment with the aims of other U.S. adversaries, and its eventual outcome are profoundly important to American interests and offer more than just a glimpse into the future of warfare.\n\n\u201cI\u2019d like to hear your views on this conflict. Who is the aggressor? What are the stakes for America and the West? What is the return on investment of our assistance to Ukraine? I don\u2019t see funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative in your budget request. Is it the Administration\u2019s view that terminating security assistance to Ukraine will make lasting peace more or less likely?\n\n\u201cWhat lessons is the U.S. military learning from the conflict? How will the Department or industry continue to learn if we cut off our partnership with the world\u2019s leading battlefield innovators? Why would Asian partners trust us if we abandon partners in Europe? What lessons are China, Iran, and North Korea learning? And how much more will they benefit if Russia prevails?\n\n\u201cI\u2019d like to hear your views on the impact of war in Europe on other theaters. The Asian and Pacific allies you just met with recently are under no delusions about how unchecked Russian aggression influences the calculus of Xi Jinping. They understand that strategic alignment among adversaries is global.\n\n\u201cAmerica must recognize, in turn, that the risk of simultaneous conflict on multiple fronts is real and growing. Your Undersecretary for Policy acknowledged this reality in his confirmation hearing this spring. But the capabilities America needs to prevail in such a conflict do not seem to be reflected in the request we\u2019ve received from OMB.\n\n\u201cSo, there\u2019s a lot we need to cover today. We\u2019ll invite you to make opening comments in just a moment. But first, I\u2019ll recognize Ranking Member Coons.\u201d", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T18:34:38Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ID=D36972AC-2283-4723-9C5A-A2D1E82583F0"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8778788615018129, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}