WASHINGTON — After a year and a half without a confirmed Pentagon comptroller, today the Senate voted 51-47 for Jules “Jay” Hurst to officially take on the role, along with greenlighting key Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) nominees.
Hurst, who performed the duties of comptroller from August 2025 until May, when he stepped away after the White House appointed him to take over the role full time, will now slide back into the role overseeing defense budgets and spend plans once sworn in.
During his mid-July confirmation hearing, Hurst vowed to focus on three main priorities if confirmed — passing a clean audit by 2028, constructing budgets that align with the ongoing evolutions in warfare while also expanding the industrial base, and improving financial management systems and processes.
Once he is back in the comptroller seat, Hurst will be overseeing Iran spending and the associated supplemental funding expected to be in the tens of billions of dollars, along with the fiscal 2027 spending request that has yet to be approved. He will also be responsible for crafting the FY28 budget request. At the same time, Hurst’s office is also under pressure to get $152 billion in 2025 reconciliation spending under contract by the end of September or risk an 8.3 percent cut to the remaining balance.
In the same voting bloc with 74 nominees, lawmakers confirmed Erich Hernandez-Baquero as the next Air Force assistant secretary for space acquisition and integration, a role that’s charged with overseeing all Space Force acquisition programs.
Hernandez-Bacquero, who goes by “HB,” will take over from Thomas Ainsworth, who is currently acting as the Pentagon’s space acquisition czar. He will be only the second person permanently appointed to the role, which was created by Congress in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, following in the footsteps of Frank Calvelli.
Once in place, Hernandez-Baquero will manage a rapidly growing Space Force investment budget. The service’s FY27 budget includes some $59 billion in research and procurement, up from $18.9 billion in FY26. He also will be faced with implementing the major workforce realignment under the service’s new portfolio acquisition executive (PAE) structure mandated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Space Force on June 10 announced that it had finalized its acquisition reorganization, adding three more PAEs to the six previously announced — for a total of nine. The three newest PAEs cover Advanced Capabilities, Electromagnetic Warfare and Cyber, and Space Combat Power.
The Senate’s vote also included a thumbs up for the Trump administration’s nominee to head the NRO, Roger Mason.
Mason, who currently is an executive at defense contractor V2X, has a background in intelligence — having served as the first assistant director of national intelligence for systems and resource analyses within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) from 2009 to 2014.
He will replace the long-serving Chris Scolese at the helm of the spy satellite agency.
