Trump to host defense firms to urge less spending on buybacks

Hadriana Lowenkron, Bloomberg News on Dec 22, 2025

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced he’ll meet next week with executives from major U.S. defense contractors in a bid to force them to spend more money on weapons development, not stock buybacks, executive pay and dividends.

“We make the best equipment in the world but they don’t make them fast enough,” Trump said. “We don’t want to have executives making $50 million a year issuing big dividends to everybody and also doing buybacks and also saying we don’t have the money to build a plant.”

Trump made the announcement Monday at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where he also unveiled plans to build a new “Trump-class” warship, in a fresh push to revive U.S. shipbuilding.

The plan for the meeting comes after people familiar with the matter said Trump could sign a new executive order clamping down on buybacks and dividends by top defense companies. The proposed directive would mandate that the companies tie executive compensation more closely to overall performance levels in delivering specific systems.

Trump’s ability to enforce such an order is unclear, and it would represent an extraordinary intrusion by the U.S. government into corporate affairs. But the administration hasn’t been shy about making similar demands in recent months, telling contractors to get in line with its priorities and even buying stakes in some companies.

Backed by Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said he intends to fix the painfully slow procurement process in which weapons are often over-budget, years late and sometimes obsolete by the time they debut. That challenge drew the ire of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who told Vanity Fair in an interview published Tuesday that Hegseth was the right person to take on the job.

“People talk about the deep state being at the State Department,” Wiles said. “It’s not. It’s the military-industrial complex.”

In October, Lockheed Martin Corp. raised its quarterly dividend by 15 cents and approved buying back up to an additional $2 billion. Northrop pays a dividend of $2.31 per share.

But the companies have also made major investments. Earlier this month, Lockheed opened a new lab focused on hypersonic weapons in Alabama as part of a $700 million planned investment from the strategic and missile defense unit in recent years to expand and upgrade facilities. Northrop has invested more than $1 billion in advanced manufacturing plants since 2018.

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(With assistance from Kate Sullivan and Courtney Subramanian.)

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