House Appropriators Add Amost $3 Billion to President’s Request for Space Force

The House Appropriations committee took the first step in crafting a FY2026 bill to fund the Department of Defense today, albeit reluctantly. Appropriators from both parties lamented the paucity of data they have about what the money will be used for, but decided to move ahead and mark up their bill at subcommittee level this afternoon. Full committee markup is scheduled for Thursday. President Trump’s request would cut about $2.5 billion from the U.S. Space Force’s budget, but the committee would restore it and add a little more. [Update: the full committee approved the bill on June 12.]

During a defense subcommittee hearing today with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both the chair and ranking member, Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) and Rep. Betty McCullom (D-MN), urged the Trump Administration to provide the detailed information Congress is usually given when the President’s budget request is sent to Congress.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the President’s full budget request on May 30 with details for other government agencies, but not DOD. A 114-page appendix is available, but that is far short of the tomes of material usually provided to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars DOD wants.

The situation is especially complicated this year because money is also being provided through the reconciliation bill, which is separate from the appropriations process. OMB is combining the funding in the two bills to assert that the request for DOD is the highest in history at $1 trillion, but that assumes all the money intended for DOD in the reconciliation bill is approved. The bill has only passed the House so far.

Calvert noted that the Senate Appropriations Committee is going to wait until the reconciliation bill is enacted before marking up their bills, but the House, which typically moves first on appropriations, can’t wait any longer with the new fiscal year beginning October 1. Calvert told Hegseth “it’s tough to do our jobs” without the detailed information, “so you might want to talk to your friends at OMB” to release it.

One surprise in OMB’s appropriations request was a drop in funding for the U.S. Space Force. It’s down from $28.7 billion in FY2025 to $26.3 billion requested for FY2026 despite the frequently-cited importance of space-based assets for national security. Gen. Chance Saltzman, Space Force Chief of Space Operations, already is expressing concerns about the level of funding and civilian personnel resources available to meet the increasing demands placed on the service.

The subcommittee’s bill adds more than $2.5 billion above the request for the Space Force, increasing the total to $29 billion, slightly more than its current level. Research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) gets a big bump-up from $15.5 billion to $19.1 billion. Procurement also gets a slight increase, while Operations and Maintenance (O&M) and Military Personnel (Milpers) go down a bit.

Of that, $4.1 billion is for the Space Force’s role in Golden Dome, part of $13 billion “for missile defense and space programs” in support of the missile defense shield.  That’s separate from the $24.7 billion in the reconciliation bill.

Subcommittee members on both sides of the aisle complained they don’t know what the money will pay for because they haven’t been briefed on the program, however. All they know is what President Trump said on May 20 — it will cost $175 billion and be completed before the end of his term three years from now.

Hegseth repeated that today, confirming the cost estimate and telling Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) Trump “charged us with having this mission-capable by the end of his term. This is not something that’s futuristic … based on some technology we don’t have.” Instead a “lot of the investment” will be ramping up production of systems, “making sure we can procure existing layers that can talk to each other, with new layers on top, because this is a layered system, as was mentioned, to include drones as well.”

Trump’s Executive Order for what was initially called Iron Dome specified some space systems including a Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor layer, proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept, and a custody layer of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, but no details have emerged about the cost or time frame for developing or deploying them. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of the Space-Based Interceptor (SBI) portion of the system alone at $542 billion. Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Montana) said at a Washington Times event on May 13 where he announced the formation of a Senate Golden Dome Caucus that the system overall will cost “in the trillions.”

Other Space Force highlights in the defense subcommittee’s bill include:

• Space Systems Procurement
  • $2.0 billion for 11 National Security Space Launches under the Phase 3 contract
  • $680 million for two GPS IIIF spacecraft
• Space Systems RDT&E
  • $3.9 billion for Missile Warning/Missile Tracking systems including satellites in low, medium and high orbits
  • $7 billion for classified programs to protect and defend U.S. space assets and ensure U.S. space superiority
  • $1.8 billion for jam resistant and wideband military satellite communications
  • $360 million for GPS operational control segment, advanced spacecraft development, and jam resistant GPS user equipment

The subcommittee markup this afternoon was closed. McCollum and full committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said afterwards that Democrats opposed the bill though the issues they cited were not space-related.

The bill provides a total of $831.5 billion for DOD in FY2026. The committee considers that the same as the request, which is level with FY2025 unadjusted for inflation.

The Trump Administration insists the request is $961.6 billion, $113.3 billion above FY2025, because they include the money in the reconciliation bill. The appropriators have no control over the reconciliation bill and do not factor it into their deliberations.

 

This article has been updated.