President Donald Trump’s so-called Golden Dome, a missile defense program to shoot down any potential threats to the U.S., will cost about $1.2 trillion to develop, deploy, and operate for 20 years, according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. That’s just a little more money than the $175 billion Trump said it would cost last year.
Trump signed an executive order calling for the creation of the program in Jan. 2025, shortly after being sworn into office for a second time. Back then it was called the Iron Dome for America. The program is modeled off of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, though the name Golden Dome became more popular, given the president’s tacky fondness for all things gold.
Trump has billed the program as something necessary to protect the U.S. from threats not just launched from the Earth, but also missiles that could be sent from space. The weaponization of space is still not a reality, at least not in the way Trump has talked about it.
“This design for the Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term, so we’ll have it done in about three years,” Trump said during a press conference in the Oval Office in May 2025.
Trump’s vision for the Golden Dome was inspired by President Ronald Reagan (his EO from last year said as much), who tried to develop something similar in the 1980s known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. The program, which envisioned lasers shot from satellites to take out missile threats, was often ridiculed in the press and became known as “Star Wars,” though guys like Trump obviously didn’t think it was so silly.
The problem with any missile defense system like the Iron Dome is that it’s famously like trying to shoot a bullet with another bullet. And while Israel’s Iron Dome works relatively well, it’s defending a much smaller area than the continental United States. As one expert who works on defense tech told Gizmodo last year, “Everyone looks at it as a replication of Israel’s Iron Dome, but we have to appreciate that Israel’s the size of New Jersey.”
The Iron Dome can also be overwhelmed, like when Hezbollah in Lebanon launched 100 rockets at it back in March. Only about half were successfully shot down, according to Israeli officials who talked with the New York Post.
The CBO estimate was requested by Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, who told the Associated Press that Trump’s Golden Dome is “nothing more than a massive giveaway to defense contractors paid for entirely by working Americans.”
Experts have expressed skepticism about the plan for the Golden Dome, with some folks like Joseph Cirincione, retired president of the Ploughshares Fund, told Gizmodo in 2025 that the Golden Dome has “no chance of stopping a determined ballistic missile attack,” despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent researching the topic over the past 40 years.
A study last year looked at what it would take to defend against a ballistic missile attack from North Korea and the results weren’t encouraging. It would apparently take over a thousand weapons orbiting in space to hit back against a single ballistic missile. But North Korea would be able to launch anti-satellite attacks and the whole thing would cost a pretty penny, according to Cirincione.
As the AP notes, the Republican-led Congress approved $24 billion for the Golden Dome project last summer. But lawmakers will obviously need to allocate a lot more if they plan on making the missile defense project a reality.
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