By Thomas Whitaker
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s Golden Dome missile-defense program has an operational site, two completed tests and a 2028 delivery date the president has asked the Pentagon to meet. What it does not yet have is a settled way to pay for next year’s work, and members of the Senate Armed Services Committee from both parties are pressing to put that money on a steadier track before the committee’s formal briefing on the program next month.
The funding question dominated a Sept. 29 hearing of the committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee, the panel’s most recent public session on the program, and it has only sharpened since. The government is running on a stopgap continuing resolution through Dec. 11, and the Pentagon’s plan for fiscal 2027 relies on a reconciliation package that has not moved.
A program that moved fast
Subcommittee chair Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) opened the hearing by crediting the administration for the pace. “This administration has supercharged these efforts,” Fischer said, according to a transcript of the hearing. “The department is finally prioritizing Homeland Defense and has requested the resources needed to rapidly develop and field new systems.”
“Golden Dome completed its first successful test in June, and I look forward to hearing about future tests when our committee will be formally briefed in November,” she said, adding that most of the architecture is classified, “and rightly so.”
Fischer also noted that the committee had pushed the idea before it had its current name. “While President Trump has named Golden Dome, the focus for this layered missile defense system came from the Senate Armed Services Committee and it was put into a study put into effect in the FY24 NDAA,” she said. “So it came from us.”
The program’s director, Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, has described rapid progress. In August he said the effort had stood up its first operational site, at Fort Story in Virginia, and completed two tests, Aerospace America reported. “We have been running hard,” Guetlein said, according to DefenseScoop. “We have our first operational site. We are digging dirt around the homeland, getting ready for the capabilities that the president asked us to deliver in the summer of 2028.”
He has also put cost discipline at the center of his pitch. “It’s one of the biggest systems that we’ve ever put together as a nation, and we’ve got to keep it affordable,” Guetlein said in August. His public cost target is $185 billion over 10 years.
The money problem
Golden Dome received $25 billion through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the reconciliation law Congress passed in July 2025, and Guetlein said in mid-August that 90 percent of it had been obligated. For fiscal 2027, the Pentagon requested about $17 billion for the program as part of a proposed $350 billion reconciliation package and just $400 million in the regular base budget, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported.
That structure leaves the program exposed under a continuing resolution, which generally holds agencies to the prior year’s regular appropriations. Because Golden Dome has had no base-budget line of its own, there is little to extend. “A CR doesn’t help me under Golden Dome because I don’t have a topline to fall back to,” Guetlein said in August. “If they don’t figure it out, there is no Golden Dome because there is no funding.” Breaking Defense called the program the “poster child” for new starts slowed by the stopgap.
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), the subcommittee’s ranking member, said his objection is to the process, not to the people running the program. The program is “being funded principally through reconciliation, which is a totally partisan process with very little input from the Appropriations Committee or the members of this committee,” King said at the hearing. “This will be one of the most expensive and largest projects ever undertaken by the United States government, and therefore the American people have a right to know how much of their money is going to go for this purpose.”
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) defended the decision to start the program through reconciliation while calling for a change. “Should it have been necessary to go to a reconciliation to get this started? And I would say, no, this should have been on a bipartisan basis,” Rounds said. “I won’t lay fault for why that isn’t happening. I’m just simply saying we need to get back to a bipartisan approach to this as soon as possible, but we couldn’t wait another year to have that happen or we’d be farther behind than what we are right now.” He urged colleagues to “include it in the underlying appropriations bill, which is ongoing.”
One of the outside witnesses, David Trachtenberg of the National Institute for Public Policy, a former deputy under secretary of defense for policy, made the same case. “Congress should commit to a regular long-term appropriations funding stream that is not subject to the vagaries of reconciliation bills, continuing resolutions or partisan politics,” he said.
Competing price tags
The hearing also aired a dispute over cost. David Mosher, who leads national security analysis at the Congressional Budget Office, said the agency’s May estimate priced a notional system meeting the goals of the president’s January 2025 executive order, not the program Guetlein is actually building, whose architecture has not been released. “We did not estimate the cost of that system at all,” Mosher said. A system consistent with the executive order “would cost about $1.2 trillion to build and operate over 20 years,” he said, with space-based interceptors the largest piece.
Fischer said the CBO figure was drawn from the executive order’s limited language and does not reflect decisions Guetlein has since made. King was skeptical of the lower number, saying “this $185 billion to me is not a realistic number.” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the full committee’s ranking member, questioned whether a system without working space-based interceptors would be worth the cost: “If we build a system without that space-based interceptors for the kind of money, even the $185 billion, are we getting what we invested?”
The two chambers have taken different approaches in their versions of the annual defense policy bill. The House-passed bill would require an independent life-cycle cost estimate of the space-based interceptor program and bar a full-rate production decision until the Pentagon certifies at least one successful operationally relevant flight test. The White House budget office said in its statement of administration policy that it “strongly opposes” that section, “which would restrict and delay” the program manager “in the delivery of the space-based interceptors layer.” The Senate committee’s bill takes a lighter touch, withholding a quarter of one Pentagon research office’s travel budget until a long-delayed independent analysis of space-based missile defense is delivered, and shifting annual Golden Dome reporting duties to Guetlein’s office.
Canada and the north
The program has a Canadian dimension that matters along the Niagara frontier. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) raised Canada’s role, and Thomas Karako of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said the president had singled Canada out as a partner in May 2025. “I think the President was right in May,” Karako said. “I think it’s extremely unfortunate that politics is getting in the way of that cooperation because we need our Canadian friends in the high north.”
Fischer said no agreement has been reached with Ottawa on Golden Dome. “They’re a good ally. They’re a good neighbor. They are modernizing NORAD right now,” she said, adding that her hope is for “a good working relationship there to really protect both of our countries.” Broader U.S.-Canada trade talks remain stalled, with no timeline to resume, The Globe and Mail reported last week.
Western New York’s defense industry has a stake in missile defense generally. Elma-based Moog builds the actuators that steer the fins on Patriot and THAAD interceptors at its Salt Lake City plant, and its chief executive told analysts in July that the company expected about $275 million in missile-program sales in fiscal 2026, WGRZ reported. No Golden Dome contract for a Western New York company has been publicly identified.
What comes next
Lawmakers return after the Nov. 3 election with the stopgap expiring Dec. 11 and the committee’s formal Golden Dome briefing expected in November. Whether the program’s 2027 money comes through another reconciliation bill, a full-year appropriations measure or another stopgap will shape how quickly the Pentagon can move from its first site toward the 2028 goal Trump set.
The Buffalo Chronicle has asked the offices of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s majority and minority, Fischer, King and the Pentagon’s Golden Dome office for comment and will update this story with any response.
Photo: Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), official portrait, United States Senate, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
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