Hegseth Puts $50 Billion for Drones and Robots in a Reconciliation Bill Congress Has Not Passed

The Pentagon's autonomy build-out now rides on a reconciliation request of at least $350 billion that the House has budgeted at $60 billion.

About $50 billion in the proposed defense reconciliation bill would go to autonomous and robotic systems, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said Oct. 14: the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), Project Agincourt and the planned Autonomous Warfare Command. He spoke on a Project Agincourt panel at the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, according to the Department of War transcript.

The 2025 reconciliation bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill, carried $1.2 billion for the effort, Hegseth noted. He called autonomy "our number one priority" and the larger request "a one-time generational investment."

That larger request is at least $350 billion, and Congress has not approved it. The House has passed a budget resolution with $60 billion for defense reconciliation, mostly for munitions and the costs of active conflicts, while Senate action has stalled, MeriTalk reported.

Hegseth said the department is "running fast immediately with the committees" on the bill "regardless of what happens in the midterms." A Democratic flip of either chamber on Nov. 3 would all but ensure it fails next year, Federal News Network assessed. Pentagon Comptroller Jay Hurst has floated a fallback: shifting the request into the base budget, which would likely force cuts elsewhere.

The money is pitched at volume. "We will be fielding hundreds of thousands of one-way attack systems this year and into the millions in years to come," Hegseth told the panel. Getting "from a thousand drones to 100,000 to one million" requires the command's architecture, he argued, and he pointed to one-way attack drones "being used in CENTCOM right now."

DAWG, run out of Special Operations Command, will move into a SOCOM task force for autonomous warfare in direct support of the new command, Derrick Anderson, the assistant secretary of war for special operations, told the panel. Hegseth announced the command on Sept. 30, with a self-imposed deadline of Oct. 1, 2027.

Current buying runs on far smaller sums. The Army said in December 2025 that a $1 billion Drone Dominance initiative would fund about 340,000 small drones for combat units over two years. The jump to $50 billion now waits on the reconciliation vote and the Nov. 3 midterms, or on Hurst's base-budget fallback, with the command due by Oct. 1, 2027.