Give it a basement with a leaking pipe and a sky full of lasers, and you can guess which meeting gets the PowerPoint. After all, the heavens promise dominance, deterrence and the future while the basement offers inspection schedules, staffing tables and loose bolts. This week, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink supplied the shiny object: He acknowledged that the United States has “on-orbit space control weapons” capable, in his description, of defending American forces against hostile action.
The details remain classified, but the significance is plain enough: the United States is no longer merely using space to communicate, navigate and watch. It has placed military weapons there. That revelation arrives amid Washington’s enormous new appetite for military space.
The administration’s fiscal 2027 proposal would give the Space Force about $71.1 billion, up from roughly $32 billion this year—an increase of about 120 percent. The proposed Golden Dome account would receive another $17.1 billion, including $4.5 billion for space programs. Pentagon officials have described Golden Dome as a roughly $185 billion undertaking over a decade.
The Congressional Budget Office, unable to assess a still-secret architecture, estimated that a more comprehensive national missile-defense system could cost about $1.2 trillion over 20 years. Meanwhile, back in the basement, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is moving in the other direction. The NRC, the independent regulator charged with protecting the public from risks at civilian nuclear facilities, has requested $892 million for fiscal 2027—$79 million, or 8.1 percent, less than this year.
Its workforce would shrink by 196 full-time positions, or 7 percent. The proposed one-year increase for the Space Force alone is about 44 times the NRC’s entire annual budget. Money is only part of the contrast.
The NRC is also reducing the time devoted to baseline security inspections at nuclear plants from 287 annualized hours to between 149 and 170, a cut of roughly 41 to 48 percent. Eight of 11 security inspection procedures will be retired and their most important elements consolidated into two. Cybersecurity inspections will move from every two years to every three.
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