Air Force budget cuts may open old wounds with Congress
The Air Force wants to accelerate its plans to retire old and outdated aircraft to meet Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order for services to cut and reallocate a portion of their spending.
But the service’s previous efforts to cut planes like the A-10 Warthog and older F-22 Raptors have shown that making such plans is easy, while actually seeing them through is far trickier.
That is because lawmakers who have the power to block cuts they disagree with, or which they fear may harm their constituents, have stymied multiple administrations’ efforts to tame and reshape Pentagon budgets.
If the Trump administration — with its focus on cutting perceived government waste — is able to break through the logjam on Capitol Hill and enact significant reductions to the Air Force’s legacy fleet, it will have accomplished something that has eluded previous administrations.
Hegseth last week ordered military leaders to draw up plans to free up 8% of the fiscal 2026 budget the Biden administration prepared before leaving office, to excise “woke ... non-lethal programs” and use that money to fund “peace through strength” priorities of the new administration.
Numerically speaking, the reduction mandate could amount to more than $17 billion in cuts for the Department of the Air Force, $15 billion of which would come from the Air Force alone, with the rest drawn from the sister service, Space Force.
“It’s not a cut,” Hegseth said in a video posted online. “It’s refocusing and reinvesting existing funds into building a force that protects you, the American people.”
But whether they are called cuts or reinvestments, some defense experts worry it won’t be as simple as Hegseth makes it sound.
Doug Birkey, the executive director for the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said the Air Force has already been stretched thin for years, and finding 8% of fat to cut will be difficult.
“For a service that has already cut to the bone over the past 30 years … they have already gone after the easy money,” Birkey said. “That was gone years and years ago.”
Besides eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a fixation for the Trump team, Hegseth also put climate science spending — or “climate change BS,” as he calls it — on the chopping block for the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, headed by billionaire Elon Musk.
Under previous administrations, the Pentagon has studied how climate change worsens natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods, which have severely damaged installations such as Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
Cutting DEI and climate efforts alone may not amount to much in finding 8% of the budget for reprogramming, said Heather Penney, a retired F-16 pilot and senior resident fellow at Mitchell.
“It’s going to be nuanced,” Penney said of cuts on that magnitude. “It’s not just going to be DEI, because I’m not sure that there’s $15 billion worth of DEI and climate change programs. I think the service is going to have to look at some of the long-term [research and development] they have.”
But cutting research and development would be tricky, Penney warned, because those efforts are crucial investments to make sure the Air Force’s capabilities are not outpaced by adversaries in the future.
The Next Generation Air Dominance platform and its accompanying high-tech engines are examples of the kind of research the Air Force should not abandon, Birkey said. A sixth-generation fighter is necessary to get the most out of the service’s collaborative combat aircraft vision, he said, and the Air Force has skimped on modernization so long that it can’t miss another generation of fleet upgrades.
Curtailing the Air Force’s F-35A buy or T-7 Red Hawk trainer program would also be a mistake, Penney argued, but the service could delay its efforts to develop a next-generation refueling tanker.
The Air Force’s budget proposal for 2025, released last year, called for the service to get $188 billion in funding, 40% of which — or $75.6 billion — would pay for operations and maintenance. Military personnel costs, including salaries and benefits, accounted for another $41.7, or 22%, and another $37.7 billion was earmarked for research, development, test and evaluation. Procurement accounted for $29 billion, or 16%, and the budget called for another $4 billion for military construction.
The Space Force, a relatively fledgling service still working to stand itself up, also doesn’t have nearly enough room to trim 8% of its spending, Penney said. That would cut nearly $2.4 billion from the $29.4 billion budget the Biden administration proposed for the Space Force in 2025.
“The Space Force has no fat to give,” Penney said. “They have to grow, and they’re as lean as they possibly can get.”
Hegseth said nuclear modernization programs would be among 17 critical functions exempted from the cuts. The Air Force is now working on the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, the successor to its Minuteman III nuclear missile, and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber.
The Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft program, which aims to create autonomous drone wingmen that fly alongside crewed fighters, is also exempt, Air and Space Forces Magazine reported.
But while Hegseth turned his ire on a perceived excess of “woke” Biden-era programs as ideal areas to cut, the Air Force is eyeing portions of its fleet the service feels is outdated.
“The Air Force is focused on retaining our desired warfighting capabilities while proposing the accelerated divestiture of legacy systems that are no longer relevant and consume limited funding and personnel,” an Air Force official told Defense News. “The Air Force previously proposed divesting a number of weapon systems but has only recently received congressional authorization to retire the aging A-10 jets.”
Air Force leaders have consistently said the service does not want to hold on to aircraft that aren’t well suited for a future fight, and repeatedly asked lawmakers during budget processes to allow them to retire old planes. This is intended to free up money, airmen and other resources needed to bring on modernized aircraft like the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter.
The Air Force’s original budget plan for 2025 called for cutting 250 aircraft, which the service said would save about $2 billion.
But in several cases, the Air Force and Congress have not seen eye-to-eye on where the service’s fleet priorities should be.
And even when the Air Force has been able to trim its fleet, Birkey said, it hasn’t always leveraged those savings effectively.
“Congress has historically been very, very uncomfortable with the capacity reductions that the Air Force has pursued, and the Air Force has not succeeded in harnessing a divest-to-invest strategy to turn the corner on necessary modernization,” Birkey said. “I have yet to find the old car I can sell that will free up enough cash to get the new one I want.”
The Air Force isn’t replacing retired aircraft with new planes on a one-to-one basis, Penney said, which is slowly eroding its ability to carry out certain missions.
“Once you give that [kind of combat capability] up, it’s very hard to get back,” Penney said. “Trying to grow your way out of a hole is something the Air Force has not been able to do.”
Birkey predicted this time around, Congress would be reluctant to sign off on steep fleet cuts to meet Hegseth’s goals.
The battle over retiring the A-10 was perhaps the most rancorous recent dispute between Congress and the Air Force, although lawmakers in recent years have relented and allowed the Air Force to start retiring the Warthog. The rugged attack jet was frequently employed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and against the Islamic State to provide close air support to friendly troops and destroy enemy targets.
As those wars wound down, the Air Force sought to retire the A-10. Officials said the A-10?s low-and-slow style would make it vulnerable to attacks from an advanced foe such as China, and it would not be survivable in a future war.
But the A-10 had influential backers in Congress — in particular, the late Sen. John McCain, whose state of Arizona was the home of a major A-10 base. The dispute over the A-10 reached a fever pitch during an infamous 2016 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, in which McCain lambasted then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh over the department’s retirement plans.
Congress and the Air Force’s dispute over the A-10 thawed in recent years, and lawmakers began allowing those planes to be retired in 2023. The Air Force intends to have all A-10s retired by the end of the decade.
More recently, the Air Force has sought to retire 32 Block 20 F-22s that are not able to fly in combat, and would cost too much to get ready for battle. But Congress has repeatedly blocked those retirement efforts.
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