The occasion was a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, where Air and Space Force leaders were testifying on the 2027 budget proposal. The committee chair, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, noted that some of their services’ top initiatives, such as F-35 modernization, are not part of the Trump administration’s $1.15 trillion baseline budget request. 

Instead, the White House is asking Congress to pass a $350 billion appropriation through reconciliation, a process for “mandatory” government spending that only requires a simple majority to pass. 

“I would just suggest that it is taking a terrible risk and creates instability when you're counting on a third reconciliation bill for the bulk of the money rather than doing base funding through the defense appropriations bill,” Collins said. 

Added Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, chair of the defense subcommittee: “I think it's safe to conclude there will not be another reconciliation bill. So, it's really not an option.” 

Collins agreed. 

More than $150 billion in defense spending was signed into law last July 4 under the first reconciliation package, known as Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. On Tuesday, House Republicans passed “Reconciliation 2.0”, which would provide $70 billion for the administration’s immigration-enforcement agencies, but does not include defense funding.

But there are still top-priority efforts that the administration wants to fund through reconciliation including Golden Dome, shipbuilding, and munitions. 

The House Armed Services Committee completed its markup of its version of the annual defense policy bill last week. That version didn’t adjust the baseline in a substantial way to cover those reconciliation priorities, but top staffers said they were confident the additional funding would be secured. 

The White House budget office anticipates that baseline defense budgets will rise from $1.15 trillion to $1.36 trillion over the next decade. It has not published plans for additional reconciliation funding after 2027. 

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., added that she was also “very concerned” that the Defense Department was relying on reconciliation for top priorities.

When Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., asked whether a supplemental bill would be crucial if reconciliation isn’t passed, Air Force Secretary Meink responded that it’s “vital” that the services get their fully-funded budget request. He added the Pentagon and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget are working “on options.”

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said, “The Democrats have no intention of helping us pass a budget,” meaning the government could face another shutdown that would force the military to operate under a continuing resolution. 

Meink said that would harm the Air and Space Force.

“That would have significant impacts on our readiness,” Meink said. “A lot of the investments we’ve just been talking about to meet the threats from the unmanned vehicles, as well as the increased readiness for weapons systems, to increase the F-35 readiness, as well as munitions procurement, all of that is substantially impacted.”

Kennedy said the Air Force and Space Force should expect another continuing resolution.

“Well, I think you should prepare for it,” the lawmaker said. “Again, I hope I'm wrong.”

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order banning unions at most federal agencies, citing a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to exempt workforces from federal sector labor law under the auspices of national security. A second order, signed last August, added a half-dozen more agencies to the initial edict.

The measure—and its implementation—have been tied up in a myriad of court cases ever since. While efforts lawsuits challenging the initiative governmentwide have been thus far unsuccessful in halting its rollout, some unions have preserved feds’ collective bargaining rights at particular agencies, including for Defense Department employees represented by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Federal Education Association.

Not so for the American Federation of Government Employees, whose contracts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered terminated in April. In a letter to the top Democrat and Republican on the House Armed Services Committee last week, Daniel Horowitz, AFGE’s legislative director, urged the committee to once again approve a proposal nullifying Trump’s executive order as it pertains to Defense Department workers.

Last year, the panel voted on a bipartisan basis to include the amendment, proposed by Rep. Donald Norcross, D-N.J., in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, and the bill ultimately passed the House with the measure in tact. It did not become law, as the Senate stripped the provision from its version of the bill.

In the letter, Horowitz argued that Trump’s use of the Civil Service Reform Act’s so-called national security exemption greatly exceeded congressional intent.

“The statutory exemption Congress wrote into Title 5 was deliberately narrow, reserved for agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency whose missions are uniquely incompatible with bargaining,” he wrote. “Applying it broadly across the entire Department of Defense departs significantly from that design and longstanding precedent. It is telling that President Trump never invoked [this exemption] during his first term.”

Though Trump did not cite that authority in his first term, he sought to delegate it to then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper in 2020. Esper ultimately declined to use that power.

Horowitz noted that a group of 16 House Republicans urged members of the bicameral conference committee to keep Norcross’ amendment in the NDAA last year, arguing that the edict “jeopardizes” rather than strengthens national security. And the Pentagon already has safeguards to ensure collective bargaining activity does not interfere with national security concerns.

“Restoring collective bargaining is not about expanding rights or constraining management,” he wrote. “Existing agreements already contain robust management rights provisions, emergency authorities, and national security exemptions that allow commanders and program managers to act when mission requirements demand. What collective bargaining provides is a structured channel for identifying and resolving workforce problems before they become operational ones, including improving safety, retention, productivity and accountability.”

The goal is to push agencies to focus less on the sheer number of known cyber vulnerabilities and more on the risks those flaws pose if they’re exploited by hackers, said Andersen, who added that the cyber community needs to “be okay with saying there are some systems that are less important than others.”

“If we try to say that everything is equally as important, then absolutely nothing’s going to be important,” he told an audience of industry professionals at a Tuesday event held by cybersecurity firm Axonius.

“It’s going to be really hard for us, if one day we have to have those hard conversations with people about how we knew better and how we didn’t prioritize risk appropriately, how we didn’t make the hard choices,” he added.

The remarks are an acknowledgment that agencies cannot protect every system equally through patch mandates, and must instead focus their often limited resources on the vulnerabilities and networks whose compromise could cause the greatest damage.

Federal agencies are a constant target for hackers. For years, adversaries have compromised government systems for access to emails, employee records and other sensitive data.

Government agencies also oversee industry sectors such as energy, healthcare, telecommunications and water, meaning their cyber staff must also weigh how disruptions could ripple across critical services.

On the sidelines of the event, Andersen told reporters that artificial intelligence-backed cyber threats are one factor informing discussions around the directive, but he said CISA’s work on the AI ecosystem still predates the release of powerful systems such as Anthropic’s Mythos.

The administration’s approach to AI has shifted in recent months as officials confront a new class of cyber-focused models that can rapidly identify vulnerabilities across computer networks, becoming a major driver of discussions over how advanced AI systems could reshape both defensive and offensive cyber operations.

President Donald Trump recently signed an AI security executive order that encourages developers to submit powerful new models to a 30-day government review before public release. On Friday, he signed a memorandum aimed at speeding up government use of advanced AI across the military and intelligence community.

“Is the [directive] a recognition that we’re in a different dynamic environment with a shorter timeline to weaponization and exploitation? Yeah, that’s certainly a part of it,” Andersen said. “But well before these last couple of months, this is a conversation that we were having about this ever-shrinking window we have for addressing vulnerabilities today.” 

“It’s too exceedingly easy for malicious cyber actors to be able to exploit [vulnerabilities] as soon as they’re published and be able to take advantage of the fact that a lot of people are just not as well-resourced as we would like, and they’re not as able to quickly have a continuous patch cycle to be able to address some of these devices,” he added.