Trump created the Space Force, Biden grew it, and now its top general worries about cutbacks.
The official US Space Force flag was unveiled in the Oval Office of the White House in May 2020. Credit: Samuel Corum/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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's overall funding level.
On March 15, President Donald Trump signed a stopgap spending bill that set the Space Force's budget for fiscal year 2025 at $28.7 billion. This was the first cut to the Space Force's budget since Trump created the military's newest service branch in 2019.
Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top general in the Space Force, worries that the budget crunch will hamstring the military's ability to match China's fast-growing space architecture. The Space Force is charged with developing and operating satellites, ground systems, and weapons that the Pentagon could use to track and target enemy forces on the ground and in space.
Saltzman called the Space Force's budget "stagnant" in remarks Wednesday at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. "In the face of an adversary who is not stagnant, I'm worried that we're not going to be able to keep pace, certainly the way we want to."
The Space Force's responsibilities also include defending its satellites from attack and preserving US advantages in space-based communication, navigation, and surveillance—all critical functions in wartime.
A fundamental disconnect
"Everybody is starting to recognize how much more critical space is becoming to our nation and to our national defense, and in the exact same timeframe, the Space Force is shrinking, and that's just a fundamental disconnect that I think we have to solve," Saltzman said.
The Space Force enjoyed a meteoric rise in its budget from the last year of Trump's first term in the White House through most of the Biden administration. Here's a breakdown of the Space Force's annual budget since fiscal-year 2021, which began in the final months of Trump's first term:
$15.2 billion in fiscal year 2021
$18 billion in fiscal year 2022
$26.3 billion in fiscal year 2023
$29 billion in fiscal year 2024
$28.7 billion in fiscal year 2025
Some of the budget uptick can be explained by the Pentagon's 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's request.
"The bottom line is our appropriated money is less than we had in '24, so we are literally shrinking in resources as a Space Force," Saltzman said. "We have less to do more with, so that's a concern, and it's starting to be a trend. We're starting to be able to connect some dots that over the last few years, even if you don't account for inflationary adjustments, we're still shrinking in real dollars. So it is a concern, and we're trying to work hard on resolving that as we go forward in '26."
Rockets fired from southern Lebanon are intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome air defense system in September 2024. Credit: Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images
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's levels, but this year, the Space Force took a budget hit of approximately $300 million.
This is happening as President Trump tasks the Space Force and other defense agencies to develop a "Golden Dome" missile defense shield, with sensors and space-based interceptors capable of taking out ballistic and hypersonic missiles threatening the American homeland.
Trump signed an executive order announcing the initiative on January 27, when he called the idea an "Iron Dome for America," a spin on the name for Israel's missile defense system. In an attempt at rebranding, the Trump administration changed the name to the "Golden Dome" a month later.
"I’m asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art Golden Dome shield to protect our homeland," Trump said in a speech to Congress on March 4. "All made in the USA. Ronald Reagan wanted to do it long ago, but the technology wasn’t there, not even close. But now we have the technology. It’s incredible, actually. And other places have it. Israel has it, other places have it, and the United States should have it, too."
Since Trump's announcement in January, Ars has spoken with multiple experts in missile defense and military policy. They agreed that such a system—at least one as ambitious as outlined in Trump's executive order—would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars and take a decade or more to build. It could also fuel a global arms race.
Still, many defense experts say creating an all-encompassing missile defense system might be a worthwhile effort—if done smartly—and technology has advanced enough since the failed Reagan-era "Star Wars" program to make it viable. The military's 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.
Space Force commander testifying.
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. Credit: Saul Loeb via Getty
Officials across the political spectrum agree we're 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't dismissing Golden Dome out of hand.
"In theory, I’m not opposed to the idea of having a system like this, but it’s not just 'the idea pops into one guy’s head and we should just suddenly spend hundreds of billions of dollars on it,'" said Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, in a March 13 discussion hosted by Punchbowl News.
"It’s really a whole series of defensive capabilities to protect against a whole series of different attacks," said Mike Rounds, R-South Dakota.
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.
The Space Force was the butt of jokes when Trump pushed the idea through Congress in 2019. Perhaps it's 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's GPS satellites provide navigation data for military and civilian users, guiding everything from precision bombs to Uber rideshares.
Cue the dollar signs
There's 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's budget is "going to need to double or triple over time" to fund everything the military needs to do in space.
The Mitchell Institute, an aerospace-focused think tank in Washington, recommended a 13 to 18 percent annual increase in the Space Force's budget in a policy paper published last month. Is that enough?
"I think the short answer is maybe not," Saltzman said. "The adversary is not stopping. They are progressing. Their curve for developing capabilities is on a different slope than ours."
The Space Force's long-term vision for countering China involves launching "proliferated" constellations consisting of hundreds of satellites, augmenting the military's legacy satellite platforms, which are few in number and expensive to replace.
The Space Force is also interested in responsive launch capabilities, in-orbit refueling, and most recently, offensive weapons that could take out an adversary's satellites during a conflict. China, like the United States, would heavily rely on space technology during a war. Cue the dollar signs.
Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO, then-President-elect Donald Trump, and Gen. Chance Saltzman of the US Space Force watch the sixth launch of Starship. Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
There's plenty of room for debate on how much the federal government should spend on defense. The Defense Department's top-line budget in the 2025 continuing resolution is $892.5 billion, nearly half of the government's 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.
However, Saltzman said political leaders are asking the Space Force to do a lot more with less.
"Just doing the 3 or 4 percent inflation increase doesn't buy us new capability," Saltzman said. "We're just treading water. So I think that's really been our pitch in the process, is recognizing that new mission requires new resources."
So how much more money would the Space Force like to have?
"$10 billion in the near term, plussing up our current resources, we can spend that," Saltzman said. "We can jump start that, and then you get into that steady state kind of growth that's necessary to continue to add the capabilities, continue to close the programs. So that's what we're really trying to sell inside the department first because there's a lot of priorities, a lot of constraints."
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.
Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed military leaders to redirect 8 percent of the defense budget from "non-lethal" programs toward Trump's priorities. Saltzman didn't identify which programs the Space Force deemed lowest priority, but he said the savings will go into a "war chest" to shift to other missions.
"I'm 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'll even get more money and more resources because we play such a central role in that," Saltzman said.
We'll 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'll see something about initial costs for the Golden Dome in the White House's fiscal-year 2026 budget request to Congress.
There's a good chance lawmakers will conclude the government can't 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's system, it makes sense to name something that's supposed to save millions of lives after a stronger, more affordable metal—like iron.