Breaking Defense
WASHINGTON — Two democratic lawmakers are raising concerns that the Pentagon’s weapons testing office has reduced the number of programs under its remit and will no longer provide oversight of several space and missile defense efforts that could potentially be linked to Golden Dome.
The Defense Department has cut 94 programs overseen by its office of the director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E) — a 37 percent reduction of the 251 programs previously on the list, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New Jersey Rep. Donald Norcross said in an Oct. 15 letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“To date you have refused to provide any analysis to justify or support these reductions,” said the lawmakers, who are members of the House and Senate armed services committees. “We remain concerned these reckless decisions undermine readiness and will result in substantial waste of taxpayer dollars while putting servicemembers’ lives at risk. We urge you to immediately reverse the decision to cut the size and scope of this office, and to restore oversight to the nearly 100 programs from the DOT&E oversight list.”
The Pentagon declined to comment on Warren’s letter, with a spokesperson stating that the department does not comment on congressional correspondence.
The lawmakers called out several space and missile defense programs that had been removed from the oversight list, including the Enterprise Space-Based Missile Warning, Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture Tranche 2 Enterprise, Space-Based Infrared Systems Survivable and Endurable Evolution, and Upgraded Early Warning Radar. While the Defense Department has not publicly laid out which systems will be a part of the Golden Dome missile shield — one of the administration’s top defense priorities —Warren and Norcross note that some of the programs eliminated from the list “could enable the Golden Dome architecture” by providing tracking and data transport capabilities needed by the missile defense system.
“If homeland missile defense is truly a top priority for the Department, rigorous testing and oversight is vital to ensure the systems are integrated and that funding is not being wasted on systems that do not tie into the broader architecture,” Warren and Norcross said.
