The Congressional Budget Office has issued a stark new price tag for President Donald Trump’s ambitious Golden Dome missile defense system: $1.2 trillion over the next 20 years, a figure that is nearly seven times larger than the $175 billion the president publicly claimed when he ordered the program last year. The report, released Tuesday, is not a definitive cost estimate — the CBO notes the Pentagon has not yet detailed how many systems would be deployed — but it marks the most comprehensive independent assessment of a project the administration says is essential to protect the United States from advanced missile attacks.
Trump ordered the system in an executive order during his first week in office, saying “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 then that he expected the system to be “fully operational before the end of my term,” which concludes in January 2029.
The CBO report, described as an analysis that reflects “one illustrative approach rather than an estimate of a specific Administration proposal,” said the lack of details from the Defense Department about what and how many systems will be deployed makes “it impossible to estimate the long term cost” precisely. The report was requested by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who in response called the missile defense project “nothing more than a massive giveaway to defense contractors paid for entirely by working Americans.”
Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, director of the Golden Dome project, pushed back on the cost estimates in testimony last month. He told lawmakers that outside groups “just take the cost of a legacy system and they multiply it out and they get these really large numbers.” “That is not what Golden Dome is doing,” Guetlein said. “We are laser focused on affordability.”
Congress has already approved roughly $24 billion for the missile defense initiative through the Republicans’ massiv