Announced with characteristic bravado and little grounding in reality, President Donald Trump’s so-called “Golden Dome for America” is the latest reincarnation of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” fantasy: a constellation of space-based missile interceptors supposedly capable of stopping a nuclear strike from any adversary. President Trump suggests it could protect the U.S. from a nuclear attack.
In truth, it will make us poorer, less secure, and more isolated. It’s a gold-plated boondoggle that will enrich defense contractors and ignite a new nuclear arms race. Let’s be clear: Golden Dome is a trillion-dollar mistake in the making.
On Jan. 27, Trump issued an executive order about continuing Reagan’s work by developing a “missile defense shield.” In response, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office issued estimates indicating that even a limited system could cost as much as $542 billion over the next 20 years. And a system to defend against hundreds of missiles from Russia or China would cost much more. My Republican colleague Senator Tim Sheehy from Montana said the quiet part out loud: the system “will likely cost in the trillions if, and when, Golden Dome is completed.”
President Trump has since pitched his Golden Dome as a $175 billion project and has requested an initial $25 billion. But not only does this math not add up, experts say Trump’s “Golden Dome” would be both ineffective and alarmingly easy to defeat.
Space-based interceptors would be sitting ducks for anti-satellite weapons. They’d be no match for adversaries who could overwhelm the system by simply building more—and much cheaper—missiles. In fact, Golden Dome would likely push Russia and China to do exactly that: expand their arsenals, reject arms control treaties, and plunge the world into a terrifying new arms race. So instead of making America safer, we’d be inviting catastrophe.
And who benefits? Not the American people. Not our troops. Not our allies. The real winners are defense contractors. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, is reportedly a frontrunner for Golden Dome contracts. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is gutting its independent testing office—the very entity that tells us whether these high-priced systems actually work. The office was reportedly targeted specifically to limit scrutiny over Golden Dome, because, according to one official, the program is “needed to be successful for Mr. Trump.”
That’s not national security. That’s corruption, pure and simple.
History should have taught us this lesson. The original Star Wars program burned through
$400 billion without producing an effective defense. Forty years later, despite decades of research, technology still can’t deliver on the fantasy of a perfect missile shield. Golden Dome is just Star Wars with a shinier name—and a much higher price tag.
What’s worse, it violates decades of bipartisan policy. Since 1999, Congress has agreed that U.S. missile defenses should only be designed to stop limited threats—like those from North Korea—not the much larger nuclear arsenals of major powers like Russia and China. Golden Dome blows up that carefully drawn line with no plan, no strategy, and no regard for the consequences.
Golden Dome is science fiction, not effective missile defense. Systems like Israel’s Iron Dome have proven useful against short-range, conventional rockets. But deploying weapons in space to counter hundreds of strategic nuclear missiles is not only impractical—it’s dangerous. And no, space-based weapons will not protect us from the types of small drones Ukraine used in its recent Spider’s Web attack on Russia.
Instead of chasing an impossible dream that risks bankrupting us and destabilizing the world, we should be investing in what actually works: diplomacy, arms control, and smart defense.
President Trump says his Golden Dome will “complete the job” Reagan started. What it will really do is bury arms control, balloon the deficit, and boost the bottom lines of billionaires like Musk. A Golden Dome would be much more effective at wasting taxpayer dollars than countering missile attacks.
Let’s not trade real security for a golden illusion. We must put a stop to this reckless plan—before it launches America into the next unwinnable nuclear arms race.
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