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.
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.”
“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 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.
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 Ground-Based Interceptors, which have been deployed for decades to take out missiles as they approach their targets. Under President Biden, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $17 billion contract to develop a next-generation Ground-Based Interceptor to defend against more sophisticated missile threats.
The $24 billion Congress approved for Golden Dome last year was a one-time allocation for fiscal year 2026, which ended on October 1. The program’s funding dried up last month because the government is currently operating under a continuing resolution—an extension of last year’s regular military budget, which, of course, did not include the $24 billion Golden Dome infusion routed through reconciliation. The preliminary funding bills in the House and Senate for fiscal year 2027, if passed as-is, would provide only a fraction of the more than $17 billion the Trump administration requested for Golden Dome in this budget cycle.
That’s because the Trump administration again separated a significant part of its record $1.5 trillion topline military budget request into a reconciliation package outside of the normal congressional appropriations process. The supplemental $350 billion funding request—which included funds for Golden Dome—went nowhere in the Republican-controlled Congress. And it won’t happen when Democrats take the gavels next year, either.
It’s impossible to judge the realism of the Pentagon’s aim to get a first draft of Golden Dome up and running by the end 0f 2028, before the end of Trump’s presidency, because so much of the system is classified—but skepticism is the safer bet. Military officials have said little about Golden Dome’s design, architecture, or concept of operations, citing a national security imperative for secrecy.
One thing we do know is that a homeland defense shield like Golden Dome will need international partners to host radar sensors, ground stations, and missile batteries. Canada is an obvious target for such a partnership, and a fully deployed Golden Dome would notionally provide protection over all of North America.
However, this part of the program is off to a slow start. Michael Guetlein, the four-star Space Force general in charge of Golden Dome development, said earlier this year that tariffs—a core Trump administration policy—were limiting his interactions with foreign governments.
So what can we expect when the next Congress convenes with Democratic majorities in January? The consensus among the experts Ars interviewed is that military leaders will still push for new options in missile defense, a need they say is underscored by their experience during the US war with Iran and Russia’s persistent missile strikes on Ukraine.
Modern missiles and drones can easily dodge existing defense systems. The stark expense of existing Western interceptors compared to the cost of Iranian missiles and drones can make defenders think twice about whether to shoot or keep their powder dry for a future attack.
“I feel like the entire effort would benefit from a better problem statement,” one former military space official told Ars. “Why do we think we need something that we don’t currently have? What’s changed? What’s different? What is it?”
This official offered some answers to these questions: “We are not in the 1970s or 1980s anymore, where it was us and the Soviet Union. The vast share of strategic threats to us were strategic ballistic missiles that we could see coming. That’s how things used to be.”
