Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Two of the top lawmakers backing the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense shield are among the wave of Republicans leaving Congress in the coming Democratic takeover, raising questions about the future of President Donald Trump’s signature second-term defense initiative. The shakeup on Capitol Hill comes after military officials signaled in recent months that they might backpedal from one element Trump asked for in Golden Dome: the capability to shoot down missiles in their initial boost phase shortly after launch. The Golden Dome has escaped serious congressional scrutiny since Trump announced the program in January 2025, one week into his second term in the White House. That lack of scrutiny will change as Democrats take responsibility for writing the Pentagon’s budget, introduce limits on funding, and put forth bills to strip out Golden Dome’s most controversial component and give the program a new name.
That’s the opinion of a half-dozen current and former officials in industry and government. Ars spoke with sources before and after last week’s congressional elections to get a sense of how a new Democratic Congress might make its imprint on missile defense. It’s important to know that much of what the Trump administration calls “Golden Dome” was already in development (or in some cases, operational) when Trump signed the executive order outlining the initiative 22 months ago. Trump’s order created a new program to consolidate the Pentagon’s existing missile defense efforts, accelerate work already underway on new Ground-Based Interceptors (GBIs), and deploy a new layer of orbiting sensors and Space-Based Interceptors (SBIs) to defend the US homeland against both traditional ballistic missiles and new emerging threats like drones and hypersonic weapons.
Ramming it through The Golden Dome was immediately politicized. The first tranche of its funding—approximately $24 billion—was part of Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” along with some of the White House’s other contentious policy priorities. The bill passed Congress on a party-line vote. This meant the budget for Golden Dome was not part of the normal military budgeting process in Congress, which usually involves both parties.
Instead, it passed Congress through a controversial shortcut known as reconciliation. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said in a September hearing that the White House’s decision to link Golden Dome’s first tranche of funding to a partisan reconciliation bill was unnecessary. “This should have been on a bipartisan basis,” Rounds said. Indeed, Capitol Hill Republicans refused the Trump administration’s effort to add $350 billion to the Pentagon’s budget this year through a similar reconciliation mechanism.
Lawmakers also formed an all-Republican “Golden Dome Caucus” soon after the unveiling of Golden Dome. Seven House members of the caucus either lost their reelection bids or did not run for reelection at all in the 2026 midterms. These include the caucus’s co-chair, Rep. Jeff Crank (R-Colo.), and the chair of the House subcommittee overseeing Golden Dome, Rep.
Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.). Both are among the Golden Dome’s biggest cheerleaders in Congress. The Democratic ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, Rep. Scott Moulton (D-Mass.), is retiring from Congress.
That leaves Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) as the next-senior Democrat on the subcommittee, with a path to becoming chairman when the new Congress convenes in January. In remarks earlier this year, he called Golden Dome a “massive, extraordinarily expensive, and ultimately inadequate defensive system.” John Plumb, then-assistant secretary of defense for space policy, testifies before a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee on March 30, 2023. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images John Plumb, then-assistant secretary of defense for space policy, testifies before a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee on March 30, 2023.
Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images “When you use the words Golden Dome, now it’s political, and when you politicize national security, you get a political response, so it is damaging,” said John Plumb, who supervised military space policy for the Biden administration, in a panel discussion at the CyberSat conference this week. The Trump administration projects Golden Dome will cost $185 billion over the next 10 years, a figure that’s hard to verify with the scarce information military officials have released about how the system will work. Other cost estimates are significantly higher. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that a national missile defense system meeting the requirements set out in Trump’s executive order would cost about $1.2 trillion.
The American Enterprise Institute released a report last year with a menu of potential Golden Dome architectures, ranging from a quarter-trillion dollars (without SBIs) to $3.6 trillion at the high end. Pentagon officials chafe at these numbers, claiming they do not take into account the military’s assumptions for low-cost launches and mass-produced satellite networks. The shiny new thing The military envisions at least hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Space-Based Interceptors in the uppermost layer of Golden Dome. These interceptors would loiter in orbit to wait for a missile attack.
SBIs have never been placed into orbit before, despite decades of research and development. The idea has been around at least since the 1980s, when former President Ronald Reagan pushed the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” weapons program. “The most ambitious element of Golden Dome is the Space-Based Interceptor layer, and that is going to face significant technical challenges,” said Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), in a congressional hearing earlier this year. “The cost, the physics, the likely reliability, in my view, do not support a full-scale space-based intercept architecture,” said Kelly, a former Navy combat pilot and astronaut. “This means that we could spend more than a trillion dollars and end up with a system that’s not going to work, and it’s not going to meaningfully improve our security.” Some critics call out Golden Dome’s potential negative impact on global stability, fearing it could spark an arms race driving the world’s other nuclear powers to expand their arsenals. “It motivates the other side to just build more missiles because the easiest way to overcome a defense like that is just to buy more,” said Frank Kendall, who served as secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration. Others point to the risks of weaponizing space—a similar argument used against the Reagan-era Star Wars program.
Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink lifted that taboo in September with the first public disclosure that the US Space Force already has weapons in orbit. A ground-based Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor is launched from the Reagan Test Site, Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, on a flight test on August 30, 2019. THAAD interceptors are currently operational, but they’re expensive, estimated to cost about $13 million per shot. Credit: Missile Defense Agency A ground-based Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor is launched from the Reagan Test Site, Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, on a flight test on August 30, 2019.
THAAD interceptors are currently operational, but they’re expensive, estimated to cost about $13 million per shot. Credit: Missile Defense Agency But there’s more to the story than SBIs. The satellites and radars that detect and track missile launches are either in use today or were already in development during previous administrations. The same goes for
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