Lawmakers rip into defense secretary over flat Pentagon budget

Two big oddities infused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s testimony as he made the rounds on Capitol Hill this week to justify the Pentagon’s budget request to appropriators: first, the Defense Department has not publicly released its full fiscal year 2026 budget; and second, the numbers he cited require passage of the deeply controversial reconciliation bill.Without it, the Pentagon’s budget would stay flat—despite the Trump administration’s touting of a $1 trillio