The Air Force is putting together a 2020 budget proposal for something that will, more or less, resemble the Space Force President Trump proposed creating as a sixth military service branch, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said here Wednesday.
“We expect to put forward a proposal with the President’s budget for FY ’20 that includes a space force department as the president has outlined,” Wilson said in response to an audience question after her keynote address to the Defense News Conference. She did not say how much funding the service would seek for this proposal.
Wilson did not specify whether the Air Force’s budget proposal would somehow create, or begin to create, an autonomous military service focused on space operations and acquisition, as Trump wants.
The ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, which authorizes spending and writes policy for Pentagon programs, said he and his Democratic colleagues generally support reorganizing defense-space programs, but not into a Space Force, per se.
“I think the Space Force is a good idea,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said in response to an audience question here following an on-stage interview. But “not [as] a separate branch. We’re going to work on it, there’s pretty strong bipartisan support for this, so I think it’s going to happen. It’s a question of details.”
Smith and House Democrats are still in the minority, but that could change if the party takes control of the House in the Nov. 6 midterm elections. Polling aggregators RealClearPolitics and 538 each gave that a decent change to happen at deadline Wednesday, based on a generic ballot that attempts to measure which party — but not which candidate — voters prefer to vote for in the upcoming election.
Smith struck a similar tone to his Senate counterpart, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who officially became chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday.
Last month, Inhofe told news outlets including Defense Daily that the White House was “winning me over” on the idea of consolidating military space programs now spread throughout the Department of Defense. However, Inhofe said he was not sold on the idea of creating “additional bureaucracy” to support such a reorganization.
The Senate Armed Services Committee would “likely” hold a hearing on defense space programs, including a possible Space Force, before the 2020 budget cycle begins. The White House’s annual budget request for all federal programs is notionally due to Congress the first week of February. Presidents of both parties routinely flout the deadline.