Congress is committing to only a fraction of the funding necessary for the Navy’s F/A-XX program in the latest version of the defense policy bill, while fully backing the development of the Air Force’s F-47 fighter.

The compromise version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act released late Sunday evening contains roughly $2.6 billion for the Air Force’s F-47 program, and just $74 million to develop the Navy’s unnamed sixth-generation fighter jet. The numbers appear to reflect a White House and Pentagon victory over lawmakers who pushed to get the long-proposed replacement for the F/A-18 Super Hornet and F/A-18 electronic-warfare jet onto the drawing board this year.

“We did make a strategic decision to go all in on F-47…due to our belief that the industrial base can only han

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