As you’d expect, funding for the Golden Dome can be found in the Pentagon portion of the legislation (under Title II). This part of the bill is broken up into sections, which are summarized in the table below based on what they buy and ordered by their total cost. (The only exception is the “Other” row, which combines a couple lower-value sections.)

All told, there’s $150.3 billion in military spending in the GOP megabill, and based on the legislative text, nearly all of it will go to private companies. Rarely will you find provisions that aren’t likely to fund contracts or outright subsidies for private industry. Here are examples from the “Ships, subsidies for private shipbuilders” row in the table (Section 20002 of the bill):

• p. 111: “$4,600,000,000 for a second Virginia-class submarine” (contracts for ships)
• also p. 111: “$750,000,000 for additional supplier development across the naval shipbuilding base” (subsidies for shipbuilders)

Most provisions in the bill are like that, and all of those in the $24.7 billion “Golden Dome” section are. This is wealth redistribution — just not the kind that either party likes talking about.

A reality TV star turned two-term president is proposing a missile shield he named the “Golden Dome,” kickstarted by a bill called the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” The truly absurd part, though, is the conversation around the Golden Dome’s price tag.

Trump recently claimed that the Golden Dome will cost $175 billion, and that the GOP megabill containing his agenda includes a $25 billion downpayment for it. As the table above shows, he’s right about the second number. The first is another story.

The president’s $175 billion figure has already been widely fact-checked and firmly established as an underestimate. The media’s consensus “well, actually” number for the Golden Dome appears to be $542 billion, which is based on a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate.

That number isn’t right either. The CBO’s $542 billion figure is being presented as an answer to a question it’s not meant to answer. Here’s what I mean:

1. The CBO estimate referred only to the cost of a missile defense system’s space-based component. The Golden Dome plan includes both ground- and space-based components. Unsurprisingly Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the front-runner to build the space-based portion.
2. The CBO was estimating the cost of a missile shield designed to shoot down “one or two intercontinental ballistic missiles” (ICBMs) launched from North Korea. Trump’s executive order specifies that the Golden Dome would defend against attacks “from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.” While that last category includes North Korea, the first two refer to China (which has more than 600 nuclear warheads) and Russia (which has more than 4,299), respectively. As the CBO notes, the number of space-based missile interceptors needed “to counter ICBM attacks by China or Russia rather than by a less capable adversary such as North Korea would need to be much bigger — and therefore more costly.”

So how much does Trump’s missile shield cost? Prepare yourself for a disappointing but accurate answer.

The Golden Dome costs as much as Congress is willing to spend on it. The project is a scam, and like most scams, it won’t shut down on its own. Trump’s missile shield is pure fantasy — it will never be completed, never become fully operational, and will consume public resources indefinitely. Technically its cost is infinite.

Trump says his missile shield — which he claimed would “defeat any foreign aerial attack on the homeland” — takes after Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which Reagan said would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” That’s exactly my point — the SDI was a giant boondoggle that ended up costing as much as Congress was willing to spend on it. It was a project defined by greed and incompetence, with great efforts made to create the illusion of competence. Per a recent article by journalist Taylor Barnes: “The army had staged a 1984 missile defense test by planting a remote-controlled explosive on the target missile so that it would blow up whether or not the interceptor actually hit it.”

The Golden Dome will provide plenty of opportunities for more great reporting like that. That’s the extent of its redeeming qualities.