House committee moves to eliminate Trump budget cuts to Space Force
Useless: In its first review of Trump’s proposed budget cuts for the Space Force, the House Appropriations Committee, under Republican leadership, immediately moved to not only eliminate those cuts, but to increase the Space Force budget another $300 million.
And these turkeys are adding this money even though they admit, due to Congress’s incompetent budget process, they really have no way to determine exactly how the money will be spent.
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.
According to the new budget put forth by this committee, the Space Force will have a budget of $29 billion, more than even the highest budget figure proposed for NASA.
This is what we can expect now from the Republican leadership in Congress. They will cut nothing, but instead restore all the spending that Trump attempts to eliminate, even money that is expressly designed to help leftist causes. They are worse than useless.
What these idiots don’t realize that if the country goes bankrupt, it will become impossible to accomplish anything. A smart person would realize it is better to only get part of what you want now (so you can maybe get the rest later) than to try to get it all immediately and instead end up with nothing at all.
But then, these are Congressmen. The word “smart” is the last word I would use to describe them.
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Useless: In its first review of Trump’s proposed budget cuts for the Space Force, the House Appropriations Committee, under Republican leadership, immediately moved to not only eliminate those cuts, but to increase the Space Force budget another $300 million.
And these turkeys are adding this money even though they admit, due to Congress’s incompetent budget process, they really have no way to determine exactly how the money will be spent.
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.
According to the new budget put forth by this committee, the Space Force will have a budget of $29 billion, more than even the highest budget figure proposed for NASA.
This is what we can expect now from the Republican leadership in Congress. They will cut nothing, but instead restore all the spending that Trump attempts to eliminate, even money that is expressly designed to help leftist causes. They are worse than useless.
What these idiots don’t realize that if the country goes bankrupt, it will become impossible to accomplish anything. A smart person would realize it is better to only get part of what you want now (so you can maybe get the rest later) than to try to get it all immediately and instead end up with nothing at all.
But then, these are Congressmen. The word “smart” is the last word I would use to describe them.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
It is so terribly disappointing. The greatest nation the world has ever seen is steadily being brought down from within.
That’s fine, as long as they reallocated money from other parts of the budget and stayed under the debt ceiling. It’s the legislative branch’s job to pass a budget for all sectors of the government, and they have to fund priorities.
Wait, we gave low-quality people with no morals who are drunk on money and power, a blank check? There’s no actual budget?
Oh no, they’ll destroy the currency, and spend us into an unsustainable debt spiral! That could destroy the union!
It can, and is happening here.
It’s not about smart, it’s about incentives. To get elected or reelected, a congressman needs the voter support. That support is skewed by whether or not the congressman is bringing money back to the district. Another part of the incentive structure is that special interest money buys the airtime to get their guy in. Fail in either of these categories and lose the election. With both positive incentives towards pork, there will be pork.
A clear sea change will need to take place. If you don’t fear the possible ways that might be attempted, you don’t know history.
The snouts cannot be removed from the trough.
Our only national political expertise is taking vast sums of public cash, along with large amounts of government printed monopoly money and spreading around the table.
The fact that we cannot then deliver on the goals the money is ostensibly sent for is totally ignored.
No moon landing, so called flagship space science programs grossly overspent.
Ships, submarines, aircraft build rates a fraction of other nations rates. Cannot even rework an existing set of aircraft into a presidential aircraft on time nor on budget.
Eventually the whole edifice will tip over under a mound of debt that cannot ever be repaid and we will have nothing for it.
The comment at the end of the article made me laugh.
“Democrats opposed the bill though the issues they cited were not space-related”
(not enough money for DEI and climate change?)
Why are they giving billions more? They’re scared. The only thing Congress controls is the purse strings. So to make themselves, and their military benefactors, feel better is another “operation Golden dome warp speed”.
“ Research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) gets a big bump-up from $15.5 billion to $19.1 billion.”
“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”
“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.”
A futuristic endeavor that’s impossible to perform its function with technology that doesn’t exist… Trillions is just the beginning.
Ronald Reagan announced Star Wars just before the Soviet union fell, they could not keep up so they folded.
Now the same methodology is happening to us, trillions will bankrupt this country permanently. The military industrial complex and their AI will control everything?
The greatest problem to overcome in a space based missile system, rotating every 90 minutes over its target, is it’s only in range for a few minutes before it’s over the horizon, that means it would need thousands of missiles dedicated to each enemy launch site (not the mobile ones) to be in range during its intercept window to be effective.
How many launch sites are in Russia? China? North Korea? And how many decoy fake missiles will be launched at the same time? Hitting a bullet with a bullet is very difficult, especially when the bullet is accelerating and changing its course and traveling at speeds greater than mock five… Faster than the explosion rate of a kinetic weapon, meaning the moment the target is detected by the missile, it is already too late destroy it.
They hope large radar stations in low, medium, and geosynchronous orbit will give them warning. Perhaps if they had Star Wars lasers, which they don’t, they just cannot focus a beam through the atmosphere in orbit to be affective. At best they’re used as a terrorist weapon to start fires.
And that’s all before enemy counter measures are used against our defensive system which will render them nearly blind and useless. Especially over their own air space.
I remind you, we have difficulty detecting and shooting down a Chinese balloon… and we still do not know what all those drones, or whatever they were we’re doing all over the East Coast and other locations around the country. no counter measures were used, I didn’t hear of not one being shot down, even though there’s thousands of detailed videos documenting the intrusion and their existence. They need to address the current in country direct threat before they spend trillions to defend us from a obsolete Cold War system. But then when have they ever told us the truth? Perhaps they are miss directing us on a fake golden dome project as a cover story for what they’re really working on? Such as a catch up to the Russians with hypersonic missile‘s? Drones that will take out air bases? AI to infiltrate command and control systems and payment systems in the economy? biological attacks, like the Chinese caught in Chicago airport recently capable of wiping out our nations crops?
Scary stuff indeed.
To paraphrase the late great P.J. O’Rourke: Giving money and power to congressmen is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
“What these idiots don’t realize that if the country goes bankrupt, it will become impossible to accomplish anything.”
They are quite aware the country is going bankrupt. They don’t care.
They figure that by the time the whole thing comes crashing down, they’ll be dead and their kids safely moved to Switzerland (or Dubai, or whatever safe place exists for rich people by then) with their ill-gotten fortune.
V-Man wrote, “They are quite aware the country is going bankrupt. They don’t care.”
And Americans continue to vote for them, over and over. Incumbents remember have something like a 99% return rate.
Quite often we have utter unknowns running as third or fourth party candidates. During the Tea Party revolt I knew and worked with many very legitimate ordinary citizens who were very conservative who ran for Congress as Republicans but could get zero traction because the public simply would not consider voting for an unknown. Instead, it keeps voting for these crooks.
As I think William Buckley once said, we would be better off electing the first 435 names in the phone book for Congress. They couldn’t do worse, and would likely approach this more honestly.
People made dire predictions of Deutchmarks in wheelbarrows which came to nought. Of course, deficit hawks only want VA cuts, not contractor cuts. Trump looks to get tax breaks passed–which is all the country club wanted –and Mr. Z is actually shocked?
At any rate, New Space will get a lifeline out of Space Force since VCs cannot be trusted. Perhaps if they were more forthcoming with investments, Space Force wouldn’t be needed.
Per Robert’s comments, perhaps the greatest oversight of the Founding Fathers was to assume that anyone, except for age, was perfectly capable of running for and serving in office. This is especially puzzling since so much of the rest of the Constitution was crafted in light of their exquisite understanding of our fallible, imperfect human nature and their desire to create a form of governmental that limited its baleful effects as much as possible. John Adams, however, offered a succinct warning along these lines — “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — but how could this principle be applied to applicants for public office? What would a “moral and well qualified” candidate be like, and how could they be chosen in an increasingly secular and pluralistic culture? And what of the discernment of the electorate?
In the two and a half centuries since then, we have experienced what happens when we allow “anyone” to run for office, with probably something close to a nadir during the Biden Administration, and they have damn near wrecked the edifice that the Founders tried to bequeath to us. The Gresham’s Law of candidates. At the same time — attributable to the Grace of God? — we have seen men and women emerge who have checked the worst that these people might attempt to do. But how long will our run of luck (or grace) continue?
https://thomasnast.com/cartoons/who-stole-the-peoples-money-do-tell/
Given both this sordid history and what we know today about both human psychology (such as why narcissists, sociopaths, and grifters — the current Democrat trifecta, with people like Gavin Newsom, Stacey Abrams, and Karen Bass as their poster kids — are drawn to power) and group behavior, isn’t it time that we consider having at least minimum standards for holding office? But how would we go about establishing and enforcing such norms in practice? (Robert Heinlein offers at least one suggestion. What other virtues should we seek in those allowed to run for office?)
Likewise, along the lines that Victor Davis Hansom writes about, how can we train our citizenry in the discernment of such things, or, indeed, how can we even reinstate the fundamental concept of responsible citizenship? Today, the most astonishing thing of all is that *the majority of voters* in most blue districts actually WANT exactly the kind of leadership (along with all of the untoward results) that we see, and they want even MORE of their policies put into place. Pass the Kool-Aid.
Hello Bob,
“And Americans continue to vote for them, over and over. Incumbents remember have something like a 99% return rate.”
Hey, last year it was down to 95%! We’re making progress!
https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Incumbent_win_rates_by_state