Space Force is expecting an increased budget when the Trump administration releases its 2027 budget request, expected later this week.
Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of Space Operations, said on Wednesday there is a broad consensus that “space capabilities need to grow, that the Space Force’s capacity needs to grow, and I think the budget is going to reflect that agreement.”
The White House intends to send its fiscal 2027 budget request to Congress on Friday, multiple outlets have reported. President Donald Trump has said he wants the budget to jump to $1.5 trillion for national defense, a roughly 50% increase from last year’s budget, which was around $1 trillion, though that included a one-time infusion of $156 billion from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“This is the first time I’ve seen, ‘No, not only do you need to grow, you need to accelerate your growth. You can’t wait five, six, seven years to be where we need to be. We need to be there in two years, three years.’ And it looks like the resourcing is going to now match those aspirations,” Saltzman said.
In January, Gen. Shawn Bratton, vice chief of Space Operations, said the size of the force is too small to manage the growing threats sufficiently and shared his belief that they “really need to double the size” of the force.
The force received roughly $40 billion in funding for fiscal 2026, about $26 billion of which was approved during the normal appropriations process, while the rest came through the tax and spending bill the president signed last summer.
“We’ve done so much of the foundational work to put in place the concepts, to do the force-design work. We know the systems that are required. We know the kinds of resiliency that’s needed. We know the training capacity that we have to add. And we’ve worked hard,” Saltzman said. “The acquisition workforce in particular has worked hard to put on contract the starting point for all of these capabilities. So now, hopefully, with just the new resources, it’s just more money on to existing programs to more rapidly expand those capacities, that’s going to be our strategy.”
Space Force will play a significant role in the military’s “Golden Dome” project, a multilayered network of sensors, satellites, and interceptors — both ground and space-based — designed to protect the country from a wide array of missile threats.
Golden Dome Director Gen. Michael Guetlein said last month that it will likely cost roughly $185 billion, a $10 billion increase compared to the $175 billion price tag Trump announced about a year ago.
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Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, told lawmakers in mid-March that the missile threat to the United States will expand exponentially over the next decade. She said the intelligence community currently “projects threats to the homeland will expand collectively to more than 16,000 missiles by 2035,” up from “the current assessed figure of more than 3,000 missiles.”
