The Pentagon wants to spend $3.5 billion next year on the Air Force’s F-47, the sixth-generation stealth fighter that Lockheed Martin is building to eventually replace the F-22 Raptor. At the same time, the administration’s fiscal 2026 budget request slashes funding for the Navy’s parallel next-generation fighter, the F/A-XX, by roughly 84 percent, dropping it from approximately $2.5 billion in fiscal 2025 to around $400 million.
The gap is striking. One service is accelerating toward production. The other appears to be pumping the brakes on the aircraft meant to replace its aging F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, the backbone of every carrier air wing in the fleet. The split sets up what promises to be one of the sharpest fights of this year’s defense budget season on Capitol Hill.
Where the money goes
Senior defense officials confirmed the $3.5 billion F-47 figure during a background briefing tied to the budget rollout in May 2026. “The budget moves forward with $3.5 billion for the F-47,” one senior defense official said during the briefing, framing the allocation as a top tactical aviation priority. The number also appears in the official DoD budget summary, which lists the program alongside other top-tier procurement and research investments. The allocation represents a significant ramp-up designed to push the F-47 from development into early production milestones.
Lockheed Martin won the F-47 contract after a competition against Boeing, a decision the Air Force announced publicly in 2024. The aircraft is designed around long-range strike, advanced sensor fusion, and the ability to operate alongside autonomous collaborative combat aircraft, or CCAs, that the Air Force is developing in parallel. At $3.5 billion in a single fiscal year, the F-47 is now one of the largest tactical aviation line items in the defense budget.
The Navy’s F/A-XX tells a different story. The Congressional Research Service, in its nonpartisan analysis of FY2026 weapon-system funding, confirms that the F/A-XX request drops sharply from prior-year levels. Boeing is the prime contractor for the program, which is intended to field a carrier-capable sixth-generation fighter that can operate in the contested airspace of the western Pacific. The roughly 84 percent reduction, measured against the FY2025 funding level, leaves the program with just enough money to sustain design and engineering work but not enough to maintain the development pace the Navy had previously planned.
Why the cut matters for the carrier fleet
The Navy’s Super Hornets are getting old. The oldest F/A-18E/F airframes have been flying since the early 2000s, and the service has been counting on the F/A-XX to begin replacing them before structural fatigue and rising maintenance costs erode the carrier air wing’s combat power. Every year the replacement slips, the Navy faces harder choices about how many Super Hornets to keep patching up and how many sorties its carriers can realistically generate in a high-end fight.
That fight, in Pentagon planning, almost always means a conflict scenario in the western Pacific. China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy has been fielding its own carrier-based stealth fighter, the J-35, aboard its newest carriers. A delayed F/A-XX means American carriers could face a narrowing technological edge at sea during precisely the period when U.S. strategy calls for credible deterrence in the region.
None of this means the F/A-XX is canceled. A single-year budget cut, even one this steep, can reflect a program restructuring, a shift in technical requirements, or a deliberate decision to slow spending while the design matures. But no Navy flag officer or senior Pentagon civilian has publicly explained the rationale. The DoD background briefing transcript details the F-47 investment but offers no comparable justification for the Navy program’s reduced request.
What the budget documents do and do not tell us
The strongest evidence here comes directly from the Pentagon. The DoD briefing transcript and budget summary provide the $3.5 billion F-47 figure from senior officials speaking in an official capacity. That number can be treated as authoritative for the president’s budget request.
The CRS report adds a second layer of credibility. Its analysts map both programs using the same Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) budget justification books that congressional appropriators rely on. CRS identifies the year-over-year funding trajectory for both fighters and flags relevant legislative actions. It is the clearest independent accounting available.
What the documents do not provide is strategic reasoning. Claims about what the funding split means for deterrence, joint force design, or the long-term health of carrier aviation fall into the category of informed analysis rather than verified fact. Those arguments may prove correct, but they rest on assumptions about threat timelines and acquisition performance that budget spreadsheets alone cannot confirm.
The precise baseline for the 84 percent figure also deserves a note of caution. The percentage depends on whether you measure against the FY2025 budget request, the enacted appropriation, or the estimated expenditure. These figures can differ by hundreds of millions of dollars. The direction and scale of the cut are consistent across all available sources, but readers should understand that the exact percentage carries some margin of uncertainty.
The congressional fight ahead
Congress rarely accepts a president’s budget request without significant changes, and a cut this visible will draw immediate attention. Members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees whose districts include Boeing facilities in St. Louis and elsewhere have strong incentives to restore F/A-XX funding during markup. The Navy’s carrier aviation community, one of the most politically connected constituencies in the defense world, will lobby hard behind the scenes.
On the other side, the F-47’s $3.5 billion request is large enough to build its own coalition. Lockheed Martin’s supply chain stretches across dozens of states, and the program’s association with next-generation air dominance gives it rhetorical weight in any debate about competing with China.
Authorization markups will decide whether the Navy’s fighter survives
The defense authorization and appropriations bills are expected to move through committee by June 2026. Those markups will determine whether the 84 percent cut to the F/A-XX survives, gets partially restored, or triggers a broader renegotiation of how the Pentagon balances land-based and carrier-based air power for the decades ahead. Until then, the budget request stands as the clearest signal yet of where this administration’s fighter priorities lie: with the Air Force, not the flight deck.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
