Where’s all that Golden Dome money going? Lawmakers want to know

Lawmakers are done asking how the Pentagon is spending $23 billion allocated for the Golden Dome missile-defense program. Now they’re writing their queries into law.

In the annual defense appropriations bill on Tuesday, House and Senate appropriators wrote that while they “support the operational objectives of Golden Dome for national security,” but criticized the Defense Department’s “decision to date not to provide complete budgetary details and justification of the $23,000,000,000 in mandatory funding” provided by the reconciliation bill passed this summer. 

“Due to insufficient budgetary information, the House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees were unable to effectively assess resources available to specific program elements and to conduct oversight of planned programs and projects for fiscal year 2026 Golden Dome efforts in consideration of the final agreement,” appropriators wrote.

The criticism, tucked into a four-bill package that included the annual defense appropriations bill on Tuesday, marks Congress’ latest concern over secrecy and spending on the missile defense initiative. Lawmakers said they haven’t received a master deployment schedule, cost schedule, performance metrics, or a finalized system architecture for the project.

The bill needs approval by both houses and the president’s signature to become law. If passed, it would require the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, the Golden Dome director, to provide a detailed breakdown within two months showing how the discretionary and mandatory funds are used for the initiative through 2027.

Starting in 2028, the Pentagon comptroller would be required to submit a separate budget justification volume annually detailing program descriptions, justifications, and requested funding for the initiative, according to the joint explanatory statement accompanying the bill.

Space and defense budget experts say the bill’s provision illustrates how lawmakers have been kept in the dark on Golden Dome and want answers.

“The fact that Congress is asking about this makes me think that even though you’ve seen DoD officials saying that they’ve been briefing Congress, they clearly have not,” said Victoria Samson, the chief director of space, security and stability for the Secure World Foundation. “Because otherwise they wouldn’t be asking for this.”

The provision would also require Guetlein to provide quarterly updates to congressional defense committees “detailing budget execution and the status of ongoing Golden Dome activities to achieve initial operational capability by 2028,” the appropriators wrote.

Golden Dome’s architecture—pitched by Trump and Hegseth as an ambitious defense system which can counter ICBMs, hypersonic missiles, and drones—has not been made public. The provision included in the appropriations bill would offer some transparency, and requires the project’s mandatory congressional reports to be “submitted in unclassified form” but added they may include a classified annex.

“Golden Dome, in particular, has been weirdly classified, and that’s a huge priority for this administration,” Samson said. “I think it’s encouraging that Congress is saying ‘look if you want all this, you need to be able to have an open discussion about what it is and what you’re trying to accomplish.’”

The Missile Defense Agency, through its SHIELD contract vehicle, has cast a wide net to recruit  defense firms for work on Golden Dome. So far, 2,440 applicants have been approved out of an original pool of 2,463 hoping to bid for the project.