Some of the budget uptick can be explained by the Pentagon\u2019s consolidation of space-related projects from the Air Force and other services into the newly created Space Force. Most of that consolidation is now complete. During the first three years on this list, Congress approved more funding for the Space Force than the White House requested. In 2024 and 2025, the congressional appropriation fell short of the Biden administration\u2019s request.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bottom line is our appropriated money is less than we had in \u201924, so we are literally shrinking in resources as a Space Force,\u201d Saltzman said. \u201cWe have less to do more with, so that\u2019s a concern, and it\u2019s starting to be a trend. We\u2019re starting to be able to connect some dots that over the last few years, even if you don\u2019t account for inflationary adjustments, we\u2019re still shrinking in real dollars. So it is a concern, and we\u2019re trying to work hard on resolving that as we go forward in \u201926.\u201d<\/p>\n Rockets fired from southern Lebanon are intercepted by Israel\u2019s Iron Dome air defense system in September 2024.<\/p>\n Credit: There are myriad political reasons why Congress this month passed a stopgap spending plan, called a continuing resolution, instead of going through the process the way it is supposed to work, where the House and Senate formulate their own versions of the budget, reconcile them, and then send the final product to the White House to be signed into law. A continuing resolution generally maintains spending at the previous year\u2019s levels, but this year, the Space Force took a budget hit of approximately $300 million.<\/p>\n This is happening as President Trump tasks the Space Force and other defense agencies to develop a \u201cGolden Dome\u201d missile defense shield, with sensors and space-based interceptors capable of taking out ballistic and hypersonic missiles threatening the American homeland.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Trump signed an executive order announcing the initiative on January 27, when he called the idea an \u201cIron Dome for America,\u201d a spin on the name for Israel\u2019s missile defense system. In an attempt at rebranding, the Trump administration changed the name to the \u201cGolden Dome\u201d a month later.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art Golden Dome shield to protect our homeland,\u201d Trump said in a speech to Congress on March 4. \u201cAll made in the USA. Ronald Reagan wanted to do it long ago, but the technology wasn\u2019t there, not even close. But now we have the technology. It\u2019s incredible, actually. And other places have it. Israel has it, other places have it, and the United States should have it, too.\u201d<\/p>\n Since Trump\u2019s announcement in January, Ars has spoken with multiple experts in missile defense and military policy. They agreed that such a system\u2014at least one as ambitious as outlined in Trump\u2019s executive order\u2014would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars and take a decade or more to build. It could also fuel a global arms race.<\/p>\n Still, many defense experts say creating an all-encompassing missile defense system might be a worthwhile effort\u2014if done smartly\u2014and technology has advanced enough since the failed Reagan-era \u201cStar Wars\u201d program to make it viable. The military\u2019s existing ground-based interceptors based in Alaska and California are designed to protect US territory from an accidental missile launch or a handful of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles from a rogue state like North Korea.<\/p>\n US Space Force General Chance Saltzman, chief of Space Operations, testifies about the fiscal year 2024 budget request during a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces hearing in 2023.<\/p>\n Credit: Officials across the political spectrum agree we\u2019re in a new era of great power competition. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, US officials want to be able to defend against massive salvos of missiles coming from the deep nuclear inventories of China or Russia. So lawmakers aren\u2019t dismissing Golden Dome out of hand.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cIn theory, I\u2019m not opposed to the idea of having a system like this, but it\u2019s not just \u2018the idea pops into one guy\u2019s head and we should just suddenly spend hundreds of billions of dollars on it,\u2019\u201d said Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, in a March 13 discussion hosted by Punchbowl News.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really a whole series of defensive capabilities to protect against a whole series of different attacks,\u201d said Mike Rounds, R-South Dakota.<\/p>\n Kelly and Rounds sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee overseeing the Pentagon, a position with some influence on what ultimately becomes of the Golden Dome proposal.<\/p>\n The Space Force was the butt of jokes when Trump pushed the idea through Congress in 2019. Perhaps it\u2019s still a punchline in some quarters, but it has a serious mission. US officials say China and Russia are developing anti-satellite weapons that could disrupt or destroy other spacecraft in orbit, jeopardizing communications, early warning, and reconnaissance missions supporting US forces around the world. The Space Force\u2019s GPS satellites provide navigation data for military and civilian users, guiding everything from precision bombs to Uber rideshares.<\/p>\n There\u2019s bipartisan consensus in Washington that those things are worth protecting, and that costs money. Frank Kendall, secretary of the Air Force under President Biden, said last year that the Space Force\u2019s budget is \u201cgoing to need to double or triple over time\u201d to fund everything the military needs to do in space.<\/p>\n The Mitchell Institute, an aerospace-focused think tank in Washington, recommended a 13 to 18 percent annual increase in the Space Force\u2019s budget in a policy paper published last month. Is that enough?<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cI think the short answer is maybe not,\u201d Saltzman said. \u201cThe adversary is not stopping. They are progressing. Their curve for developing capabilities is on a different slope than ours.\u201d<\/p>\n The Space Force\u2019s long-term vision for countering China involves launching \u201cproliferated\u201d constellations consisting of hundreds of satellites, augmenting the military\u2019s legacy satellite platforms, which are few in number and expensive to replace.<\/p>\n The Space Force is also interested in responsive launch capabilities, in-orbit refueling, and most recently, offensive weapons that could take out an adversary\u2019s satellites during a conflict. China, like the United States, would heavily rely on space technology during a war. Cue the dollar signs.<\/p>\n Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s CEO, then-President-elect Donald Trump, and Gen. Chance Saltzman of the US Space Force watch the sixth launch of Starship.<\/p>\n Credit: There\u2019s plenty of room for debate on how much the federal government should spend on defense. The Defense Department\u2019s top-line budget in the 2025 continuing resolution is $892.5 billion, nearly half of the government\u2019s overall discretionary spending. The Pentagon failed the seventh consecutive audit of its accounts last year. While the Space Force has supporters on both sides of the political aisle, the Pentagon regularly falls under bipartisan criticism for wasteful spending.<\/p>\n However, Saltzman said political leaders are asking the Space Force to do a lot more with less.<\/p>\n \u201cJust doing the 3 or 4 percent inflation increase doesn\u2019t buy us new capability,\u201d Saltzman said. \u201cWe\u2019re just treading water. So I think that\u2019s really been our pitch in the process, is recognizing that new mission requires new resources.\u201d<\/p>\n So how much more money would the Space Force like to have?<\/p>\n \u201c$10 billion in the near term, plussing up our current resources, we can spend that,\u201d Saltzman said. \u201cWe can jump start that, and then you get into that steady state kind of growth that\u2019s necessary to continue to add the capabilities, continue to close the programs. So that\u2019s what we\u2019re really trying to sell inside the department first because there\u2019s a lot of priorities, a lot of constraints.\u201d<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Defense officials are waiting for the Trump administration to release its budget request for fiscal year 2026. For now, the White House is holding the figures close to the vest. Details of the budget proposal should reveal whether the Pentagon, and particularly the Space Force, will prevail in a climate of government downsizing.<\/p>\n For now, the Space Force is under a civilian hiring freeze imposed by the White House. Some military civilians took the Trump administration\u2019s offer of early retirement, and the Space Force doesn\u2019t have a way to replace them.<\/p>\n Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed military leaders to redirect 8 percent of the defense budget from \u201cnon-lethal\u201d programs toward Trump\u2019s priorities. Saltzman didn\u2019t identify which programs the Space Force deemed lowest priority, but he said the savings will go into a \u201cwar chest\u201d to shift to other missions.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m very hopeful that the case that the Space Force makes means that a lot of that money will come back into our budget, and potentially, with initiatives like Golden Dome, we\u2019ll even get more money and more resources because we play such a central role in that,\u201d Saltzman said.<\/p>\n We\u2019ll find out soon just how gilded Trump wants to make the Golden Dome. Military officials owe the White House a report on possible Golden Dome architectures at the end of this week. Presumably, we\u2019ll see something about initial costs for the Golden Dome in the White House\u2019s fiscal year 2026 budget request to Congress.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a good chance lawmakers will conclude the government can\u2019t afford to add any superfluous bells and whistles to the proposed missile defense shield, if it goes forward at all. Maybe, with due deference to Israel\u2019s system, it makes sense to name something that\u2019s supposed to save millions of lives after a stronger, more affordable metal\u2014like iron.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The US Space Force celebrated its fifth birthday last year, when it boasted an annual budget of $29 billion, about 3.5 percent of the Pentagon\u2019s overall funding level. On March 15, President Donald Trump signed a stopgap spending bill that set the Space Force\u2019s budget for fiscal year 2025 at $28.7 billion. This was the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44364,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6455,2539,518,9603,257,519,2118],"class_list":["post-44362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-chance-saltzman","tag-donald-trump","tag-golden-dome","tag-iron-dome","tag-military-space","tag-missile-defense","tag-us-space-force"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44362"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/GettyImages-2172008565.jpg\")
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\n Jalaa Marey\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n![\"Space](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/saltzman.jpg\")
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\n Saul Loeb via Getty<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nCue the dollar signs<\/h2>\n
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\n Brandon Bell\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n