Trump’s Golden Dome faces headwinds with funding uncertain
Golden Dome, President Trump’s lofty plan for a national ballistic missile defense shield, is facing heavy headwinds with project funding still uncertain.
The missile defense program, estimated to cost some $1.2 trillion over 20 years of development and operation, needs a significant influx of funding to get it off the ground this fiscal year.
But the Pentagon made a risky move in its budget strategy, requesting a $1.15 trillion base budget and a $350 billion reconciliation package to be passed on a party-line vote. The bulk of the Golden Dome funding in fiscal year 2027 is in the reconciliation tranche, raising doubts about whether a lame-duck Congress will be able to inject the program with the dollars it needs to proceed.
Thomas Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that, as of Thursday — the start of the fiscal year — “the program has no money.”
“This stands or falls with FY-27 appropriations, and I said that’s the single most urgent thing for Golden Dome,” he told The Hill. “It is life and death from that standpoint. Without money there’s no program, it’s just PowerPoint slides.”
The Senate Armed Services subcommittee raised this issue numerous times during a Sept. 29 hearing, at which Karako testified.
“Should it have been necessary to go to a reconciliation to get this started? I would say no. This should have been on a bipartisan basis,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said at the hearing. “I won’t lay fault for why that isn’t happening, I’m just simply saying we need to get back to a bipartisan approach to this as soon as possible.”
The subpanel’s ranking member, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), said the effort is one of the “most expensive and largest projects ever undertaken by the United States government,” making it “very bothersome” that the Trump administration didn’t resource it via the traditional appropriations process.
Trump announced in January 2025 that the Pentagon would build an expansive homeland missile shield intended to protect the skies over the continental U.S. using a network of space-based missiles launched from satellites to intercept missiles launched from the ground.
The Trump administration has insisted the expensive, untested technology is necessary to protect against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, as well as other next-generation aerial attacks.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in May estimated that Golden Dome will cost about $1.2 trillion to develop, deploy and operate over the next 20 years. Broken down, that includes $740 billion for a space-based missile warning and tracking system, $270 billion for multiple layers of ground-based defenses and $180 billion for other activities — including deploying a sensor system and conducting research and development.
Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, who is overseeing the program, estimated in March that the missile defense system will cost just $185 billion.
To fund the effort, Trump-aligned Republicans included $24.4 billion for the project in their “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which the president signed in July 2025.
Then, in March, Congress gave the Pentagon $22.5 billion to begin building Golden Dome through a reconciliation bill, but Guetlein this summer said 90 percent of that money was obligated in less than six months.
This year, the Pentagon requested $17 billion for Golden Dome as part of the proposed $350 billion reconciliation package, with only $400 million for the program in the base budget. The strategy leaves Golden Dome in a vulnerable position, as Congress appears to have little desire to pass another spending bill through reconciliation.
Adding to the program’s challenges is the federal government operation under a continuing resolution, a stopgap funding measure that began on Oct. 1 and holds spending at prior year levels — as part of a bipartisan deal to prevent a government shutdown.
Guetlein in August had warned a continuing resolution “doesn’t help me under Golden Dome because I don’t have a topline to fall back to to get that percentage of the continuing resolution.”
If Congress can’t find a route to fund the program, “there is no Golden Dome because there is no funding,” he added.
Lawmakers this week also seem unsure exactly what the system will provide beyond what the U.S. military already gives to homeland defenses — a glaring question at the center of the Senate hearing last week.
In his opening testimony, Karako said Golden Dome “suffers from a serious lack of strategic messaging and explanation of what it is and what it’s trying to do.”
Without that messaging, the references to the program “conjure up fanciful ideas and memes. Critics and cheerleaders project onto it their fears or fantasies, and political polarization doesn’t help,” he said.
King later questioned whether Trump’s executive order, which says Golden Dome will deter and defend U.S. citizens and critical infrastructure, creates an expectation of nationwide shield that the senator said is “just not in the cards.”
“One of the questions that has to be discussed is whose being projected? And what is the Golden Dome actually going to do?” King asked. “Who decides who is protected and who isn’t?”
Karako suggested that Golden Dome as proposed would give protections to certain major cities and critical infrastructure rather than provide a shield over the entire country.
He later told The Hill the U.S. military has “almost nothing” for aerial threats beyond a ballistic missile or bomber aircraft, including drones and cruise missiles.
“It’s not that it can’t be seen; it can be,” he said of the threats. “We just have to be looking for it.”
“We have to have different kinds of sensors, and we have to have them looking in the right place, and we have to be telling them to beep and squawk when the more fulsome spectrum of threats is seen,” he continued, adding that Golden Dome could fill that void.
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