Trump Wants 25 National Cancer Institutes’ Worth of Golden Dome Missile Defense Spending

By Dave Levitan | May 21, 2025 | 10:04am

Screenshot via the White House

Trump Administration Golden Dome

Trump Wants 25 National Cancer Institutes’ Worth of Golden Dome Missile Defense Spending

The various policies and maneuvers emanating from the increasingly gold-plated Oval Office, whether explicit and sent forth in a slightly skewed Executive Order-ese or more tacit and downstream of the bigotry and civic and scientific disdain that infects the entire administration, collectively continue to offer vague hints as to when, exactly, American was Great before. There are the president’s repeated claims that it was the Gilded Age, when the Vanderbilts and Carnegies and their ilk controlled approximately as much of the country’s wealth as Trump himself would like to control now, that is worth going back to; there are the only barely hidden attempts to resegregate into a second Jim Crow era; or the kneecapping of a century’s worth of scientific enterprise suggesting it is perhaps a pre-penicillin, pre-vaccine era when enough of the populace might be at risk of dying young as to prevent much of an outcry that would reach the tops of the mountain.

And now there is the Golden Dome, an absurdist attempt at a national, space-based missile defense system, that firmly places us back in another era of Making America Great, the Reagan years. Back then, it was officially called the Strategic Defense Initiative, but popularly came to be referred to as Star Wars; the system, of course, was never built, though the spending on various corners of science and tech likely did have positive trickle-down impacts over the subsequent decades (funny, how basic research spending can do that). Now, Trump wants $25 billion allocated to the new project this year, and $175 billion over the life of the project — more than the annual GDP of, say, Morocco, or put another way, about the annual budget of 25 National Cancer Institutes.

Most Popular

Trump claims that the new system can be “fully operational before the end of my term,” a promise akin to Musk’s 2016 claim he would get humans to Mars within six years, or his 2024 edit that puts them on the Red Planet within four, or the company that said in 2022 they would open a space hotel in, uh, 2025. The supposed comparison is to Israel’s Iron Dome, a missile intercept system that successfully shoots down many short-range rockets over a country approximately the size of the US’s fourth-smallest state. There is relatively widespread agreement that an actual missile defense system covering the entire US is extremely difficult if not outright impossible; the Congressional Budget Office itself has found that, even with far lower launch costs than in previous decades, such a system might end up costing as much as $542 billion. Now we’re in the ballpark of Thailand’s or the UAE’s GDP, or more than 75 years of full NCI funding.

The odds of any of us waking up 20 years from now and looking up at a fully functional invisible protective blanket in the sky are essentially zero, but that doesn’t really matter to the administration or its friends. As CNN and others have pointed out, all those billions, if allocated, will flow directly toward a select few companies — like SpaceX — to play with some toys for a while before the whole thing gets quietly abandoned, or renamed and downgraded and walked back until its something else entirely. In the 1980s, after billions of dollars were spent, the SDI saw its budget cut after reports of its infeasibility; Trump, who never met a bit of science or technology he actually understood, thinks his version will be immune.

“Ronald Reagan wanted it many years ago, but they didn’t have the technology,” he said on Tuesday. “But it’s something we’re going to have. We’re going to have it at the highest level.” Indeed.