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The Trump administration’s plan for a “Golden Dome” national missile defense system could cost more than $1 trillion to develop and operate over the next two decades, according to an estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The CBO on Tuesday published a report which estimated that developing, deploying and operating a Golden Dome missile defense in line with what President Donald Trump outlined in his executive order would cost about $1.2 trillion over 20 years.
Per the order, the Golden Dome would be designed to defend against ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles, as well as other aerial threats. It would cover the entire U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii, with the capacity to engage a regional adversary or a small-scale attack by a peer, though it could be overwhelmed by a full-scale attack by a peer or near-peer adversary, CBO said.
In the report, the CBO considered a national missile defense system with four layers of interceptors, including a space-based layer, two wide-area surface layers – including an upper layer and a lower layer, and a surface-based regional sector layer.
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It would also include additional sensors, communication systems, and battle management systems to coordinate the collective action between the system’s layers.
The most expensive portion of the Golden Dome system would be the space-based interceptor layer, which the CBO said would account for about 70% of acquisition costs and 60% of total costs.
Acquisition costs for the Golden Dome system as a whole would total a little over $1 trillion over the 20-year period, while average operation and support costs would average more than $8 billion per year.
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The CBO’s estimate notes that there are substantial uncertainties about how quickly components of a national missile defense system could be deployed.
CBO’s operation and support costs are based on a 20-year period starting in 2028 for surface-based systems and in 2030 for space-based systems. It noted that operation and support costs are likely to be slightly higher if deployments occur later.
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CBO noted that the director of the Office of Golden Dome for America in recent public statements estimated the cost of the program’s objective architecture would cost $185 billion to deploy over the next decade.
The White House’s 2027 budget request documents call for the Golden Dome for America Fund to receive an average of $15 billion per year for the next five years.
As a result, CBO noted the difference “raises the possibility that either GDA’s objective architecture is more limited than CBO’s notional NMD system or DoD expects funding from other accounts to contribute to GDA (or both).”
CBO added that because of the “limited information available about the Administration’s planned NMD architecture, a direct comparison of DoD’s and CBO’s NMD systems and their costs is difficult,” as many aspects of the plan could ultimately differ from those of its analysis or the objectives of the executive order.
