The House on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026, passed a $839 billion full-year funding bill for the Defense Department with a pay raise for service members, military assistance for Ukraine and an $8 billion overall boost in defense spending. (Eric Kayne/Stars and Stripes)
The House on Thursday passed a $839 billion full-year funding bill for the Defense Department with a pay raise for service members, military assistance for Ukraine and an $8 billion overall boost in defense spending.
The 341-88 vote sends the legislation to the Senate, which will have less than a week to fund the Pentagon and the vast majority of the federal government before a shutdown deadline on Jan. 30.
The defense appropriations bill provides funds for the priorities outlined in an annual defense policy bill passed in December and is bundled with a pair of other domestic funding measures.
Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said the defense portion “champions American military power, ensuring that our brave warfighters have the tools, weapon systems and capabilities to meet any foe anywhere in the world at any time.”
Lawmakers boosted the defense budget about $8 billion above the Trump administration’s request, though Senate appropriators had initially wanted a $22 billion hike. The increase includes extra funding for Navy shipbuilding and renovations of Marine barracks.
A senior Senate GOP aide speaking on condition of anonymity said the final top line was still “insufficient” to meet needs such as missile production, modernization of facilities and shipbuilding. President Donald Trump has said he will ask Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget next year.
The funding bill for fiscal 2026, which began Oct. 1, 2025, covers the 3.8% pay raise service members received this month and continues pay increases for junior enlisted service members. It also includes a 1% pay bump for the Pentagon’s civilian employees.
The legislation also allocates more than $1 billion for medical research programs that develop treatments for cancer, disease and other service-related injuries — a funding increase of more than $600 million from last year.
In a rebuke of the administration, the legislation provides $400 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a long-running program to arm and train the Ukrainian military. The administration had sought zero funding for the assistance.
Appropriators are additionally allocating $200 million for a similar program to provide military aid, training and defense equipment for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — Baltic nations that are on NATO’s eastern front line.
Language in the bill expresses “ironclad” support for NATO and its member states, but Democrats argued this week that the measure needed to take a stronger stance as Trump cast doubt on the alliance and pushed to take control of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.
“I look at the defense appropriations bill as maybe the last opportunity to prevent this administration from doing something crazy in Greenland or attacking NATO or doing something that we all know is a bad thing to do,” said Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee.
The committee on Thursday morning rejected an attempt by Democrats to secure a vote on an amendment to the defense bill that would have prohibited the invasion of a NATO ally.
Rep. Ken Calvert of California, the Republican chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, touted the legislation as a bipartisan effort to confront an increasingly complex threat environment.
“This bill protects the administration’s ‘America first’ defense agenda, supports the department’s innovation efforts and includes my four key priorities,” said Calvert, pointing to investments in weapon modernization, streamlining Pentagon bureaucracy, countering drug trafficking and revitalizing the defense industrial base.
