President Donald Trump’s big space missile defense project is going way over budget.
A new analysis published Tuesday from the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the “Golden Dome” weapons system will rack up an estimated $1.2 trillion bill for the American taxpayer over the next 20 years.
When Trump signed the project into existence in the first week of his second term, an initial $25 billion was earmarked in a congressional budget bill, and by May last year, Trump said in an Oval Office announcement that he expected it would require $175 billion to become a reality.
The Associated Press reports that the new analysis has been described as “one illustrative approach rather than an estimate of a specific administration proposal.”
The vagueness is largely down to the Defense Department giving few details on the project, which the report says is “making it impossible to estimate the long-term cost.”
The CBO report was requested by Sen. Jeff Merkley. After it was published, the Oregon Democrat labeled it as “nothing more than a massive giveaway to defense contractors paid for entirely by working Americans.”
The Golden Dome has been an ambition since the very beginning of Trump’s term.
“Over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex with the development by peer and near-peer adversaries of next-generation delivery systems,” he said as he signed the order 16 months ago.
The project has drawn comparisons to Israel’s Iron Dome system, which has been put through its paces during Israel and Trump’s war with Iran, and ongoing conflicts with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. said the dome had been 99 percent effective at protecting Israel from Hamas and Hezbollah missiles.
Rafael, the maker of the dome, also said it destroyed most of Iran’s missiles fired at Israel, Reuters reported on Monday.
Spokesperson Yuval Steinitz told a conference in Jerusalem that 1,500 rockets had been fired at Israel by Iran in two conflicts since 2024, with “only several dozens” making it through its defenses.
But even when Trump’s order was signed, eyebrows were raised to the roof about the scale and feasibility of such an undertaking in the U.S., not least because it would need weaponry in space and the ability to stop hypersonic missiles traveling faster than the speed of sound.
Speaking to The New York Times in January of last year, senior research fellow at Chatham House Marion Messmer said, “Israel’s missile defense challenge is a lot easier than one in the United States.
“The geography is much smaller, and the angles and directions and the types of missiles are more limited.”
Trump, meanwhile, hopes the project will be “fully operational before the end of my term,” and the administration is pushing forward with high hopes.
Testifying to Congress in April, the project’s director Gen. Michael A. Guetlein said that various estimates from external bodies “Just take the cost of a legacy system and they multiply it out and they get these really large numbers and they say, well, that must be it.
“That is not what Golden Dome is doing. We are laser-focused on affordability.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
