Golden Dome faces a funding and cost reckoning as Congress weighs the missile shield’s future
The Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense program is moving into the year’s budget fight with a shaky funding model and a cost dispute that has the Pentagon and independent analysts far apart.
The administration’s fiscal 2027 request seeks $17.5 billion for the program, $17.1 billion of it from a planned reconciliation package. That would repeat the approach used last year, when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave Golden Dome $25 billion, about 90 percent of which had been obligated by mid-August.
Senators from both parties have warned against relying on that route. Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., who chairs the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, said at an Air Force Association conference that boosters still have a lot of work to do to build support on Capitol Hill, and warned against leaning almost entirely on reconciliation. The Arms Control Association reported that Senate Majority Leader John Thune has indicated that a second tranche of reconciliation money is now unlikely. At an earlier hearing, lawmakers complained that using reconciliation had wrapped a broadly supported mission in partisan politics, leaving the program’s near- and long-term future uncertain. The Senate panel took up those questions again at a September 29 hearing. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said the name “Golden Dome” implies national coverage, and witnesses agreed a dome over the entire country is not realistic.
The Pentagon’s price for what it calls the objective architecture is $185 billion, up from the $175 billion the administration first cited. The Congressional Budget Office disagrees sharply. In May it estimated that standing up and operating the system would cost about $1.2 trillion over 20 years, while noting that the Pentagon had not released the architecture details needed for a firm estimate. CBO said dropping space-based interceptors from the plan would cut the 20-year cost to $448 billion.
Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, who runs the program, has rejected the higher figures. He told a defense conference that outside analysts are “not estimating what I’m building,” arguing that they apply costly battlefield-system pricing to a homeland mission that calls for a cheaper approach.
Space-based interceptors are the most technically ambitious and most expensive piece. Space Systems Command has picked 12 companies, including Anduril, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and SpaceX, to develop prototypes, with integration into the architecture targeted for 2028. Guetlein has said the layer is not guaranteed. “If we cannot do it affordably, we will not go into production,” he told House lawmakers.
Congress now faces a deadline. The government is funded under a stopgap that expires December 11, so the Golden Dome money will not be settled until lawmakers resolve the larger FY27 spending fight. Trump has said the system will be operational before his term ends in early 2029, and Guetlein has said the program is on schedule.
Pentagon rewrites the rules on contractor profit as Army plans a supply-chain stress test
The Pentagon is changing how it decides what defense contractors earn and how much it knows about their costs, while the Army prepares a public competition meant to expose weak points in the industrial base. Together, the moves show a department trying to attract new suppliers and pay less for old ones.
The profit overhaul is a pretty big shift. The Defense Pricing, Contracting and Acquisition Policy office has told contracting officers to benchmark profit against commercial sectors, weighing private investment, execution risk and value delivered over traditional cost-based measures. It also calls for rulemaking within 90 days to revise the department’s profit policy.
The new directive demands more cost visibility, with new requirements calling for full cost transparency across all supply-chain tiers for products and services valued at $10 million or more, whether or not certified cost or pricing data is required. The Aerospace Industries Association warned that the approach could add to acquisition timelines and create barriers for companies seeking to work with the Pentagon.
Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle used the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual meeting on Oct. 12 to announce an unusual exercise. The Army’s first-ever “Manufacturing Rodeo,” set for early next year, will be a race between industrial base partners meant to strain the service’s organic industrial base and the broader manufacturing network. Telle said the goal is to stress test the supply chain and the manufacturing processes, though he offered few details on how it will work.
Telle tied the event to the Army’s drone ambitions. He said the Army needs to make millions of one-way attack drones, and that production bottlenecks and a lack of suppliers for key parts have plagued the service for decades. The Army has built advanced manufacturing hubs at Red River, Anniston and Tobyhanna depots and signed public-private partnerships with Hadrian and Siemens. The announcement was Telle’s first major public address in the job. He became acting secretary after Dan Driscoll resigned amid tensions with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and he made clear the Army is staying on the course Driscoll set.