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........

© The Hill