The Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense plan could cost about $1.2 trillion to develop, deploy and operate over the next two decades, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate released Tuesday. The estimate also said the system could be vulnerable to a full-scale attack by Russia or China.
That price tag is far above the $175 billion the White House had previously pointed to, and it includes more than $1 trillion in acquisition costs alone. The CBO said the system would be designed to shield the United States from ballistic and cruise missiles, but anything more complex than 10 intercontinental ballistic missiles launched at once would drive costs even higher.
Jeff Merkley, the Oregon Democrat who has criticized the project, said Trump’s so-called Golden Dome is “nothing more than a massive giveaway to defense contractors paid for entirely by working Americans.” His comments came the same day the budget office’s numbers put hard edges on a program Trump has described in sweeping terms since he returned to the White House in January.
Trump unveiled plans for the system just days after taking office in his second term and ordered the Defense Department a week later to submit plans for a shield that could deter and defend against aerial attacks. He said the network would rely on next-generation technologies across land, sea and space, with space-based sensors and interceptors that he said would be capable of catching missiles fired from the other side of the world or from space.
Last month, SpaceX and Lockheed Martin won contracts worth up to $3.2 billion to develop prototypes for space-based missile interceptors. The CBO’s estimate suggests those kinds of systems would be central to the price, with the cost to acquire and operate a fleet of space-based interceptor satellites making up about 70% of the total.
The backdrop is a familiar one in Washington: officials have said existing defenses have not kept pace with more sophisticated weapons, but there have also been longstanding doubts about whether the United States could build a comprehensive shield for such a vast land mass. The CBO said its estimate was based on limited information about the system’s architecture, leaving open the possibility that the final bill could climb further if the design becomes more ambitious. For now, the question is no longer whether Golden Dome will be expensive. It is how much more expensive it becomes if Washington tries to make it do more than 10 ICBMs at once.
