“This is not going to be helpful over on the Hill,” one former congressional staffer said of SDA’s $11 billion, five-year draft budget. “In fact, it could put the final nails in SDA’s coffin.”

“The last few years have been quite good for the association’s annual meeting and for the Army,” the AUSA president told us, but “I’m very, very worried” about the 2020 budget.

If you count next year’s budget, the president will be actually selling himself short. But his other superlatives are not justified.

One space expert, with no skin in the NSSL game, opined that for the most part Blue Origin’s protest is “simply whining,” and characterized SpaceX’s lawsuit as “sour grapes.”

“As long as we get an appropriation by the beginning of the calendar year, I think we’ll be okay,” the Army’s chief of budget planning said.

Senate Republicans and Democrats remain far apart on using DoD money for the border wall — so far that the government might not gets its 2020 budget on time,

“We have been been given a lawful order by the president to respond to this crisis on the border and we’re doing that,” a Pentagon official said.

Presumptive Deputy Defense Secretary Norquist pledged to “revise budget review timelines and data collection standards to maximize senior leader decision-making quality and timing.”

If Congress fails to pass the 2020 budget, the Navy will have to delay necessary repairs on two nuclear-powered carriers, further stretching the fleet at a critical time.

“Today, the House passed H.R. 2500, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2020 by a vote of 220 to 197, without the support of a single Republican.”