CBO: Golden Dome to cost $1.2 trillion

A new report estimates Golden Dome will cost taxpayers $1.2 trillion to build, deploy and operate over 20 years. For perspective, that price tag — which greatly surpasses the annual budgets of California ($321 billion for FY 2026) and New York ($254.4 billion) — is roughly double Germany's €524.5 billion budget ($614 billion) for 2026.

The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) new total dwarfs the Trump administration’s previous $175 billion cost estimate for the prospective missile defense system — slated to protect the entirety of the continental U.S. from aerial threats, including nuclear ones.

Despite qualms regarding its price tag, feasibility, and national security risks, the Pentagon has requested $17.5 billion for the project in FY 2027.

Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, tells RS that CBO’s “massive” $1.2 trillion estimate “could be low.”

“CBO assumes the deployment of fewer than 7,800 space-based interceptors [for Golden Dome]. But the ratio of space-based interceptors to missiles fired necessary to cover the entire United States could be as high as 1000 to 1,” Murphy told RS. “Even if we spent $1.2 trillion on this system, it wouldn't come close to defending the United States from Russia and China's arsenal of nuclear weapons.”

“The fact that CBO’s estimate is almost an order of magnitude higher than what the administration says it will cost can only mean one thing: the administration is not actually building what the executive order described,” Todd Harrison, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Defense One.

A report Harrison wrote last fall found Golden Dome would cost about $3.6 trillion to operate over twenty years.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, (D-Ore.), who requested the cost estimate from CBO, slammed Golden Dome as a “massive giveaway to defense contractors paid for entirely by working Americans.”

“The American people want leaders in Washington who focus on lowering prices and creating opportunities for families to get ahead, not waging more costly conflicts and padding the pockets of their defense contractor friends,” Sen. Merkley said.

Late last month, Space Force tapped several contractors to work on space-based interceptors for Golden Dome, including Anduril, Booz Allen Hamilton, and General Dynamics. FY 2027 budget request documents call for the Golden Dome for America Fund to receive an average of about $15 billion per year for the next five years.