U.S. President Joe Biden’s plans to cancel the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear program have emerged as an early political brawl in a brewing fight over next year’s defense budget.
Defense firms are sounding the alarm that they expect to lose employees who refuse to comply with a federal COVID vaccination requirement for contractors, due to take effect in December.
A bipartisan group of 13 lawmakers wrote to the Pentagon in support Lockheed Martin’s proposed $4.4 billon acquisition of rocket maker Aerojet Rocketdyne.
While the cost of the nation’s pandemic response is putting pressure on the defense budget, its unlikely Congress will make a sweeping, indiscriminate cut, according to Senate Armed Services Committee chairman.
Republican Rep. Ken Calvert is willing to meet Democratic lawmakers partway in their reported plans to trim the defense budget: cut back on civilian employees, not equipment and modernization.
New START, which limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, expires Feb. 5 unless the U.S. and Russia agree to extend it.