Mike Johnson Says Pentagon Wants $350 Billion To Fight 'Communism On Our Own Shores' And Much Of The Request Is Classified

House Speaker Mike Johnson wants Congress to approve one of the largest defence cash injections in American history, and he says lawmakers will learn what much of it is for behind closed doors.

The Louisiana Republican told reporters on Tuesday that House Republicans would be briefed by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon that evening on a £261 billion ($350 billion) White House funding request, made amid the ongoing war with Iran.

Justifying the sum, Johnson said the country is 'fighting communism on our own shores' alongside 'evil terrorists and tyrants around the world', and acknowledged that much of what Hegseth outlines will be classified.

The remarks have drawn sharp scrutiny because they tie an enormous military budget to a domestic ideological enemy at a moment when courts have already ruled some of President Donald Trump's troop deployments to US cities unlawful.

A £261 Billion Request Wrapped Inside Reconciliation 3.0

The money would move through what Republicans call Reconciliation 3.0, a third GOP-only budget package that can pass the Senate with a simple majority and no Democratic votes. Johnson said the House Budget Committee, chaired by Texas Republican Jodey Arrington, would mark up the bill on Thursday after late-night negotiations over its contents.

The package is expected to bundle the Pentagon boost with two unrelated Republican priorities: a grant programme encouraging states to adopt voter identification rules under the Trump-backed SAVE America Act, and measures targeting what the party describes as fraud in federal programmes.

The defence request comes on top of a record £858 billion ($1.15 trillion) annual military spending bill and a separate £65 billion ($87 billion) supplemental that includes £50 billion ($67 billion) for the Iran war.

'You heard the president talk about how he wants to effectively double the funding for national defence,' Johnson told reporters. 'Look, we live in dangerous times. We're fighting communism on our own shores, and we're fighting evil terrorists and tyrants around the world, and we have to be able to protect our national security.'

The reconciliation route matters as much as the sum. Because the process needs only a simple majority in the Senate rather than 60 votes, Republicans can load the bill with partisan priorities that would otherwise die to a filibuster.

Johnson said he was on the phone with Arrington late into Monday night settling the framework, and declined to reveal its full contents before the Thursday markup, telling reporters they would see the details then.

What Lawmakers Will Learn Only Behind Closed Doors

Pressed on the details, Johnson pointed lawmakers to the Pentagon rather than the podium. 'Secretary Hegseth and his team will go through and outline a lot of this. Much of that is going to be classified for us,' he said. A companion report in The Hill noted that much of what the request would fund is classified, leaving the public with little visibility into where the money would go.

The secrecy compounds concerns already raised in the Senate about the sheer pace of the buildup. During a recent hearing on the separate defence supplemental, Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine noted that the extra requests sit 'on top of a presidential budget request that increases the Pentagon's budget by 40 percent in one year'.

Republican senators including Susan Collins of Maine have also pushed back on elements of the additional spending, and Senate Democrats last week blocked the £858 billion ($1.15 trillion) defence authorisation bill.

The Domestic Enemy Framing Behind The Budget Pitch

Johnson's invocation of communism at home was not a slip. He has used the phrase repeatedly since a slate of Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates won primaries in New York, telling a June press conference that 'the insurgent left is on the rise' and that every American needed to wake up to the threat. He has pointed to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as the movement's figurehead.

What alarms critics is the pairing of that rhetoric with military money. Trump has deployed active-duty Marines to Los Angeles and ordered National Guard units into cities including Portland, Memphis and Chicago, deployments that courts have in several instances ruled unlawful.

The president has also described American cities as potential 'training grounds' for the armed forces against what he calls the enemy within. Federal troops are generally barred from domestic law enforcement under longstanding law, with narrow exceptions for insurrection.

Neither Johnson nor the White House has specified which element of the £261 billion ($350 billion) request, if any, would relate to domestic operations, and the classified nature of the briefing means the answer may never be public. That gap between the rhetoric and the receipts is precisely what Democrats are expected to attack as the reconciliation bill moves to a vote.

Congress is being asked to sign one of the biggest defence cheques in its history for a fight its Speaker has located partly at home, on terms most Americans will never be allowed to read.