Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the White House’s proposed defense budget for fiscal 2026 is insufficient for the challenges facing the country.

The budget request as constructed will not deliver a “military capable of maintaining deterrence and applying force when necessary to protect U.S. interests,” Wicker said during his opening remarks of a hearing with the secretary on Wednesday.

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“Across the budget, we see significant holes: shipbuilding, tactical fighters, basic maintenance money, and more — all insufficient. The budget seems to be written as if there are many items in the reconciliation package that simply are not in that bill,” Wicker continued. “This budget threatens to undermine the good work we have done together on that bill, and it leads me to question whether some officials in the administration plan to ignore congressional intent.”

The defense budget request is approximately $893 billion, matching the enacted defense spending of fiscal 2025, which would actually mean a slight reduction in buying power due to inflation. Congress is also looking to pass the reconciliation bill, which includes a bump of $150 billion in defense spending over the next handful of years.

The White House and Pentagon argue that when combining the two, the budget request and reconciliation, it makes up the first-ever trillion-dollar defense budget in the country’s history.

Hegseth said last week, and reiterated on Wednesday, that they view it as “two bills and one budget.”

Later in Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Angus King (I-NH) pressed the senator on the “bifurcated” budget, saying, “It’s a two-part defense budget: Part of it is in reconciliation instead of in the budget that’s being presented to this committee.”

Wicker expressed frustration at the “precious little detail and no follow-on data about fiscal years 2027, 2028, or 2029” and said the Office of Management and Budget “intends to maintain defense spending at $893 billion across the four years of this administration.”

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The secretary heard similar criticisms last week when he testified before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense.

It’s not uncommon for the first defense budget of an administration to come later than usual, though the current administration is “officially the latest budget submission of the modern era,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), the top Democrat on the subcommittee, said last week.