Tony Bertuca

The Trump administration said Monday that the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital will receive a 35% equity stake in the corporate parent of a private Venezuelan oil company as part of a sweeping agreement giving the U.S. government ownership and governance rights over a major share of Venezuela’s oil production. Under the agreement announced by the White House, North American Blue Energy Partners has been granted 100-year concessions for 17 Venezuelan oil fields with approximately 65 billion barrels of proven...

The House voted 370-48 today to approve the Senate’s version of a continuing resolution that would extend government funding through Dec. 11, sending the measure to President Trump to be signed into law and averting the possibility of a politically costly government shutdown on Oct. 1.

The Pentagon seeks congressional authority to shift nearly $1.5 billion in funding toward emerging priorities, including a major expansion of artificial intelligence capabilities and changing requirements in the Middle East following Operation Epic Fury, according to a budgetary reprogramming package obtained by Inside Defense. The request, which covers both increases and decreases across fiscal year 2026 and FY-25 funds, seeks to move $600 million into a high-performance, classified AI compute center, describing the effort as an “urgent requirement”...

Several key defense conferences will be held this week in the Washington area featuring senior Pentagon leaders.

The Pentagon is seeking to reprogram $80 million from an account supporting international innovation initiatives, saying the funds became available after department policy reviews delayed the launch of new Australia-United Kingdom-United States Pillar II projects, according to a document obtained by Inside Defense. The proposed move, detailed in a budgetary reprogramming document

The Pentagon is defending a newly signed agreement with the National Institutes of Health after House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) accused the Trump administration of attempting to divert billions of dollars from NIH to fund Defense Department activities. The interagency agreement, signed Aug. 4 and 5 by Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear deterrence, chemical and biological defense policy and programs, and NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya, establishes a framework for NIH to...

The U.S. military is moving toward a high-low mix of drone capabilities as the Pentagon seeks to rapidly scale the use of unmanned systems, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said Wednesday. “There’s a big effort inside the joint force and inside the department to scale drone capability,” Caine said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual emerging technology conference. Caine said the effort will include both advanced, high-end unmanned systems and large quantities of less-expensive...

Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems are being used "every day" in the U.S. military's Central Command and European theaters as the Joint Force works to build confidence in technologies that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine said will become a permanent part of the military's force mix. “There’s a bunch of examples of the CENTCOM [area of responsibility] that are ongoing right now. There’s a bunch of examples in the Europe AOR. We use it every day,” Caine...

The Defense Department is beginning to acknowledge that congressional appropriators will likely need to shift many billions of dollars in key fiscal year 2027 priorities into a regular discretionary spending bill if lawmakers cannot provide the Pentagon with everything it has requested via a $350 billion reconciliation package, according to DOD Comptroller Jay Hurst. Hurst said the department expects to have a clearer picture around December of how much funding Congress ultimately provides through reconciliation and which priorities...

Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Christopher Mahoney is urging Congress to give the Defense Department greater flexibility to move funding as the Pentagon overhauls its requirements process, arguing faster identification of military needs will accomplish little if DOD remains constrained by an inflexible budget system. “We have to have a system that goes end to end,” Mahoney told