Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

4. Department of Defense · Major · Needs Congress

Develop the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N)

Partially done

124 4. Department of Defense

“The Biden Administration canceled this program in its 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). The next President should support and accelerate funding for development of the SLCM-N with the goal of deployment by the end of the decade.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The program schedule this item could not read is in the Department's own FY2027 budget, released 2026-04-21 and read in full 2026-09-06. The Overview Book records that the Navy "established a program office" compliant with the FY2024 NDAA's direction to create an ACAT-1D program and a warhead project, that "the SLCM-N program completed a milestone A decision in December 2025", and that it "remains on track to achieve a limited operational capability by FY 2032 and initial operational capability by FY 2034" — the Department confirming the FY2026 NDAA sec. 1633 milestones as its own plan, and confirming that the Mandate's "deployment by the end of the decade" is not the schedule being worked to. The money is the other half of the finding. The R-1 exhibit carries SLCM-N as program element 0105519N with **$1,677,309 thousand in the FY2026 P.L. 119-21 spend plan and no discretionary or mandatory request at all for FY2027**; the Overview Book's nuclear-modernization table states the same as $122M actual in FY2025, $1,686M enacted in FY2026 and **$0 requested for FY2027, a change of −$1,686M** — the only line of the twelve nuclear systems tabled that goes to zero. Reconciliation money is available through FY2029, so this is a program funded ahead rather than a cancellation, and the Department presents no gap; but the administration asked Congress for nothing further for SLCM-N in FY2027, which is the opposite end of the ask's "accelerate funding". Milestone A is a real acquisition step forward and the rung stays `partial`: `done` needs deployment.

  2. Partially done

    Sec. 1633 of the FY2026 NDAA rewrote the SLCM-N milestones set by the FY2024 NDAA: a limited operational deployment of a quantity set by the Nuclear Weapons Council by 2032-09-30 and initial operational capability by 2034-09-30 — later than the Mandate's 'end of the decade'.

  3. Partially done

    The reconciliation act appropriated $2 billion 'to accelerate the development, procurement, and integration of the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile' (sec. 20008(a)(7)) and $400 million for its warhead at NNSA (sec. 20008(b)(4)), available through FY2029. Funding is accelerated as asked; the missile is not deployed.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The program was made a program of record by sec. 1640 of the FY2024 NDAA (P.L. 118-31, December 2023), before the tracking window; the events above are the second Trump administration’s funding and schedule, not the reinstatement itself. done would require deployment.
  • The first note’s claim that no program page could be read was wrong about the hosts and looking in the wrong place (re-read 2026-09-06). media.defense.gov and www.navy.mil both open; the failure recorded as a refusal on navy.mil was the bare hostname, which does not resolve without “www.”. But the SLCM-N schedule is not on a Navy program page at all — it is in the Comptroller’s FY2027 budget documents at comptroller.war.gov, which is where the 2026-04-21 event above now rests. What was checked and gave nothing: the Navy’s news-stories listing reads cleanly and carries no SLCM-N item in its current listing, and www.navy.mil has no working site search (it returns “not found” for a real term and for a nonsense term alike, so no negative can be taken from it). The war.gov press-products feed (500 items back to 2021) returns no SLCM-N document, and the Department’s own story on the FY2027 nuclear-triad investment (war.gov article 4474675, 2026-04-30, read) itemizes Sentinel, LRSO, Columbia, B-21 and Trident and does not mention SLCM-N — consistent with the $0 FY2027 request rather than with a missing page.
  • The NNSA warhead half is still unread here: this search covered Department of War material, and nothing on energy.gov/NNSA was opened. The $400M appropriated by sec. 20008(b)(4) is recorded from the enacted text above, not from an NNSA schedule.
Action
reinstate
Object
Sea-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N)
ID
255