The Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile defense system could cost taxpayers as much as $3.6 trillion over the next 20 years — far exceeding the White House’s $175 billion estimate — and still fail to deliver on its central promise to protect the United States from nuclear threats.
In a new report, Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog organization, argues that some of the technological challenges for the project are likely “insurmountable.”
“If Golden Dome could guarantee our security for nuclear weapons, one could argue that these astronomical costs would be worth it, but from all these viability problems and the history of failed attempts, it’s very clear that it won’t,” Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, told Federal News Network.
Decades of investment in missile defense have yet to produce a system capable of reliably intercepting an intercontinental ballistic missile — the United States has spent more than $450 billion pursuing that goal and yet no system has demonstrated the ability to stop even a single ICBM.
