Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first trip to Capitol Hill to argue for next year’s Pentagon budget shed new light on funding for some of the Air Force’s top-priority acquisition programs, even as the department continues to hide its 2026 request from view.
The military will invest in advanced technologies that could prevail in a war with China while cutting less-resilient equipment that has been saved by parochial interests, Pentagon officials told the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel at a June 10 hearing.
“President Trump has charged us with making the big difficult decisions after a lot of deferred maintenance and deferred decisions to ignore parochial priorities, in large part, and focus on what the department needs and where it needs it and when it needs it,” Hegseth said. “That means some tough calls.”
Hegseth said the Air Force will seek $3.5 billion for its future F-47 fighter, a next-generation jet that would direct drone wingmen around combat zones and aims to deceive Chinese air defenses in a potential conflict. House appropriators are offering the program slightly less money at $3.2 billion for 2026; the Republican-led reconciliation bill includes $400 million to accelerate its production.
In written testimony, Hegseth promised the F-47 will be the “most advanced, lethal, and adaptable fighter ever developed, with state-of-the-art stealth technologies to stay one step ahead of America’s adversaries.”
“The F-47 will have significantly longer range, more advanced stealth, be more sustainable, supportable, and have higher availability than our fifth-generation fighters,” he said. “[The] platform will also take significantly less manpower and infrastructure to deploy.”
Bloomberg reported June 4 the F-47 would siphon money away from F/A-XX, the Navy’s own effort to design a next-generation fighter. Boeing will begin building the Air Force’s secretive stealth jet under a contract worth an estimated $20 billion; the program is expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars overall.
The Air Force is also asking for $804 million for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program that is designing AI-enabled drone wingmen to boost air power in a conflict without risking additional lives. House appropriators have not said how much money their bill would offer the program.
Hegseth told Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.) the aircraft, in development at Anduril and General Atomics, are fully funded in the 2026 budget. Flight tests are slated to begin by the end of September, said Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell, who is standing in as the Pentagon’s comptroller.
But Hegseth indicated those programs, which the Air Force has long touted as game-changers for air warfare, will come at the expense of other platforms that previously piqued the service’s interest.
He suggested the Air Force will abandon its plan to replace its E-3 air target-tracking planes with the E-7 Wedgetail, a more advanced airborne warning-and-control jet used by Australia and the United Kingdom. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported last month the E-7 program was on the chopping block in favor of a shift towards space-based surveillance.
“There are platforms we’ve supported as a result, and there’s some platforms and systems that we won’t support going forward,” Hegseth said when asked about the way forward on E-7 procurement. “We’ve learned a lot of things from what has happened in Ukraine. We’ve learned a lot from what China is attempting to do and the systems they’re building. So if we have systems and platforms that are not survivable in the modern battlefield or they don’t give us an advantage in a future fight, we have to make the tough decisions right now.”
The Pentagon will “fund existing platforms . . . more robustly and make sure they’re modernized,” he added.
While defense officials are willing to continue to review options like the E-7, Hegseth said, “investments in existing systems that carry forward that capability alongside even bigger investments in space-based [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] gives us the kind of advantages we need on a future battlefield.”
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), whose district is home to the remaining E-3s at Tinker Air Force Base, cautioned against retiring existing capabilities before relying on unproven technology in space. About half of the E-3 fleet has retired as the Air Force tries to piece together a network of sensors that could perform the same mission.
“I’ve been on this committee a long time,” Cole said. “I watched the U.S. Army waste $29 billion on the Future Combat Systems [program] because it was going to be so great.”
“I would just urge you to look at this pretty carefully as you make the decision,” he said. “We certainly will as a committee.”
Washington’s wait for the Pentagon’s $832 billion base budget blueprint—more than four months after the statutory deadline to send their ask to Congress—hasn’t stopped lawmakers from moving forward with their own ideas.
Shortly after questioning Hegseth, Woollacott MacDonnell, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine in a cramped hearing room in the Capitol complex, House appropriators headed upstairs to adopt an $832 billion defense spending bill without having received a plan from the administration to base it on.
“We don’t have the luxury of time,” Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), who chairs the House defense appropriations panel, said at the hearing. “We’ll just have to work out the differences we have in conference. But it’s hard for us to do our job without the . . . detailed information.”
The full House Appropriations Committee will vote on its 2026 defense spending bill on June 12. The Pentagon is expected to publish its full budget request later this month.