Space Policy Centralization and the Accountability Gap at the National Space Council

The National Space Council, as described in Project 2025, is designed less as a coordination mechanism than as a presidential enforcement tool. The text is explicit: the NSpC exists to 'ensure that the President's priorities relative to space are carried out' and to 'resolve policy conflicts among departments and agencies.' That framing subordinates the independent technical and legal judgments of NASA, the FAA, the Commerce Department, and the Intelligence Community's space equities to White House political direction. When policy disputes are resolved by proximity to the President rather than by expertise or law, the accountability chain runs upward to a single political actor — not outward to Congress or the public.

The Costs of War Project's research on Pentagon contracting is directly relevant here. National security space — the chapter's stated top priority, framed around competing with China — is one of the fastest-growing segments of defense contracting. The arms industry's tools of political influence, documented by Costs of War, include funding think tanks and staffing government advisory committees. Centralizing space policy in a White House council that operates without the transparency of a Cabinet agency, and that explicitly coordinates with OMB to 'find offsets in lower-priority programs,' creates structural conditions for those industry relationships to shape national security space acquisition far from congressional scrutiny.

The OSTP section of the same chapter sharpens the concern. Project 2025 proposes an executive order to 'reshape' the U.S. Global Change Research Program on the grounds that its assessments — including the National Climate Assessment — 'reduce the scope of legally proper options in presidential decision-making' and can 'frustrate successful litigation defense.' This is a straightforward proposal to subordinate scientific outputs to legal strategy and political preference. The Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News record on classification reform is instructive by analogy: decades of executive classification reviews have consistently failed to reduce overclassification precisely because they were designed by the same agencies with institutional interests in secrecy. Science reviews designed to protect the administration from adverse litigation outcomes will produce science shaped to that end.

The reform path is clear and grounded in existing oversight architecture. Congress should codify the NSpC's charter in statute rather than leaving it to executive order, require that NSpC deliberations produce public records subject to Government Accountability Office review, and restore the traditional firewall between OMB budget coordination and independent agency scientific assessment. The OSTP Director's Senate confirmation — already required — should be paired with a statutory obligation to transmit scientific assessments to Congress unaltered by OMB or the National Security Advisor. Civilian control of national security space policy is not served by concentrating authority in a White House council answerable to no one but the President.