Welcome to the New Year!… And to federal budget purgatory… The National Defense Authorization Act for the financial year 2022 is law, but the U.S. Senate hasn’t passed a budget to pay for it. Lawmakers know this is not how you run a railroad, so this coming Wednesday the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense is holding a hearing about the impact. In this episode Laura Winter asks, who should be testifying and what questions need to be answered, from Mir Sadat, a former National Security Council director for defense and space policy, an Atlantic Council fellow, and a scholar with West Point’s Modern War Institute; Peter Garretson, a book author, and podcaster, a senior defense studies fellow Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, as well as the editor of one of the most important space reports out there, State Of The Space Industrial Base; and Christopher Stone, a Senior Fellow for Space Studies for the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Advantage Research Center, and the author of the upcoming policy paper Maneuver Warfare in Space: The Strategic Mandate for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion.