Congress bought the government three more months of funding, but the Space Force says the stopgap carries a price. About 10 percent of the service’s programs will be stuck without a real budget, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Schiess told reporters at the Air, Space and Cyber conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
The continuing resolution, which runs through Dec. 11, keeps roughly 90 percent of programs on existing spending lines because they were funded a year ago. The remaining tenth cannot move without new money. Schiess said he would rather have a budget than the stopgap, adding that the threat is not slowing down.
The timing is awkward. The service requested about $71B for fiscal 2027, a sharp jump from the enacted total a year earlier, as it pushes to roughly double its uniformed ranks from about 10,000 Guardians. Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna said emerging missions such as space control need an acquisition process that can build and deliver systems.
Erich Hernandez-Baquero, the new assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said the resolution puts the brakes on a modernization drive at the moment the service needs to move faster.
Also stalled is a $350B reconciliation package that would carry $17B for Golden Dome and about $12B for Space Force efforts, including Space-Based Air Moving Target Indication and the Space Data Network.
The service has operated under continuing resolutions for more than half of its seven-year life, and the Pentagon has begun 38 of the last 50 fiscal years without new appropriations. This one stretches past the November elections, leaving a service that wants to grow with no new money to grow on.
