President Trump is poised to get his first big windfall for his Golden Dome with a proposed $25 billion to jumpstart the purported missile defense system.
The billions of dollars earmarked for the Golden Dome — part of the GOP’s reconciliation bill to increase Pentagon spending by $150 billion — means the system long touted by Trump on the campaign trail will soon start to solidify.
But the proposed system, meant to act as a shield protecting the continental U.S. against ballistic, hypersonic and advanced cruise missiles, has its fair share of issues out of the gate, including its enormous price tag, potential effectiveness and feasibility.
Questions have also been raised as to whether defense contracts to build the Golden Dome could be used to pad the wallets of businesses owned by billionaire Elon Musk and others.
Here are five things to know as the system takes shape:
Project likely to exceed GOP funding
The Golden Dome missile shield is set to receive $24.7 billion to kick off the initiative, dollars meant to tie together existing programs with newly developed technology.
The reconciliation bill, currently working its way through Congress, allocates the majority of the money to efforts that would set up a network of satellites and interceptors in space that can detect and help shoot down any incoming missiles.
That effort includes $7.2 billion to develop and buy space based sensors, $5.6 billion to develop space-based missile interceptors, $2.4 billion for non-kinetic missile defense capabilities, such as electronic warfare tools, and $2 billion for military satellites with air moving target indicators.
For the technology on the ground, lawmakers included $2.2 billion to speed up the development of hypersonic defense systems, $1.9 billion to better ground-based missile defense radars and $800 million for accelerated development and deployment of next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile defense systems.
But the project is expected to cost far more than the initial $25 billion, with experts and analysts predicting the dollar amount for the entire system could reach hundreds of billions, possibly into the trillions.
The high costs partly come from the sheer amount of satellites needed to cover and protect the entire U.S. via sensing and tracking missiles — some 400 to more than 1,000 satellites, Reuters reported.
Another 200 attack satellites — armed with missiles or lasers — also would be used to knock down enemy armaments, sources told the outlet.
Musk’s role draws scrutiny
One emerging source of contention around the Golden Dome has been the possibility that the billionaire Elon Musk could get a chunk of the change in contracts via his company SpaceX, an outcome that would appear to be a conflict of interest given his role in the Trump administration.
Musk, who is the CEO of SpaceX, donated over $270 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign and is now serving as a special adviser to the president as he spearheads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk’s company now appears to be a front-runner to win a major contract in building out the Golden Dome, according to a Reuters report last week, setting off alarms in Congress.
“This is a deeply troubling report,” a group of 42 Democrat lawmakers wrote in a May 1 letter to the Defense Department inspector general. “All of this raises concerns about whether defense contracts to build a Golden Dome are an effective way to protect Americans or are meant to enrich Mr. Musk and other elites.”
Elsewhere, Senate Armed Services Committee senior member Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), has introduced a new bill that would bar any federal contracts from being issued to companies owned by any special government employee, such as Musk.
“When the richest man in the world can become a Special Government Employee and exert influence over the flow of billions of dollars of taxpayer money in government contracts to his companies, that’s a serious problem, Shaheen said.
Questions emerge on technology feasibility
When Trump announced he would ask Congress to fund the Golden Dome, remarks given in his presidential address to lawmakers on March 4, he referenced former President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) — a project to protect against intercontinental ballistic missiles that was ultimately shuttered.
Reagan “wanted to do it long ago, but the technology just wasn’t there, not even close. But now we have the technology. It’s incredible, actually,” Trump said at the time. “It’s very important. This is a very dangerous world. We should have it. We want to be protected.”
Reagan in the midst of the Cold War in 1983 proposed SDI, nicknamed the Star Wars program, but the program didn’t move beyond research and development and was shuttered in 1993.
While Washington’s technological advancements have grown leaps and bounds since then, the equipment needed for a Golden Dome could still take years to develop. Such defense capabilities include space interceptors to take out targets mid-flight and non-kinetic options like directed energy, lasers and high-power microwaves.
Experts have said a more sensible goal would be to improve the country’s existing missile shield — comprised of several layered systems — as a way to prepare for future threats from the likes of Russia, China, Iran or North Korea.
The U.S. already protects itself from any potential incoming long-range missiles via radars and ground-based interceptors located in Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.
Other defense elements protect against shorter range missiles, such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, which at one point was ready to be used to defend Hawaii when North Korea ramped up its missile testing several years ago.
Washington, D.C., meanwhile, is protected by NASAMS, a short-to medium-range ground-based air defense system.
Major upgrades to these systems, in addition to the space-based component Trump seems to want, would take years to do.
Lawmaker questions vulnerability issues
Beyond questions as to whether the U.S. currently has the technology to create a Golden Dome, there’s also doubts as to the feasibility of such a project. Multiple studies have concluded that the defense system would be vulnerable as it could be overwhelmed should adversaries decide to launch multiple weapons at the same time.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) brought up that very issue on Wednesday before the U.S. military’s top missile defense officials, noting that Russia and China have publicly expressed concerns with U.S. missile defense systems.
“With what we know about Russia’s efforts to develop and deploy a nuclear weapon to space and their fear of U.S. missile defenses, has there been an assessment done on the likelihood or increased chance that Russia would employ such a weapon in conflict early on to take out our space based intercept layer?” Moulton asked during a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing.
Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Andrea Yaffe deferred the question to the intelligence community, but Moulton persisted.
“No, no, it’s an operational question. You’re going to spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money building things that could inspire the Russians to say, ‘Oh, we need to take them out before they get used.’ You better figure that out if you’re going to spend a lot of taxpayer money on this,” he said.
Moulton also questioned whether the system could defend against sea-based attacks — as in missiles fired from a ship — as Trump has appeared focus on defense from aerial attacks.
“You can run a boat up into Los Angeles Harbor, right? It’s clear that Golden Dome is not designed to defend against that,” he said, to which Gen. Gregory Guillot, the head of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, agreed.
“Seems like another big hole we should investigate before we spend a lot of money on this,” Moulton added.
Plan derives from Israel’s Iron Dome
Trump’s dreams for the Golden Dome stems from Israel’s Iron Dome, a system the small country uses as a means to take out short-range rockets and artillery fired from up to 43 miles away.
The commander-in-chief first appeared to latch onto the idea of a similar system for the U.S. homeland in December 2023, noting “we don’t have a dome ourselves. We’re going to have the greatest dome ever.”
Later, at a rally in New Hampshire in January 2024, he announced he’d “build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield, and it’s all made in the USA.”
But while Israel’s Iron Dome is designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery fired from no more than 43 miles away, that defense system wouldn’t work for the continental U.S.
Washington’s potential threats would instead come from intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from countries like Russia, China, Iran or North Korea, not short-range projectiles which no adversary country is within distance of the U.S. to use.
“Iron Dome was a system tailor-made for Israel,” said Tom Karako, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Missile Defense Project, told The Hill last year. “Putting an Iron Dome on every corner is neither affordable nor is it sensible.”