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golden dome
Golden Dome as a Leaky Golden Shower: Trump's $4 Trillion Missile Defense System Ridiculed in DC
"This is not defense, it's deception—an illusion of safety. The Pentagon has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last several decades proving that this freaking thing doesn't work."
Apr 02, 2026
Critics of the 'Golden Dome' missile defense shield program championed by US President Donald Trump gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC on Wednesday to ridicule and condemn the wasteful military program, which experts warn will never work as promised but will plow billions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the weapons industry.
Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and found of the anti-war group Up In Arms, led the event which included the unveiling of an art installation—complete with a statue of Trump holding a golden umbrella filled with holes, urinating missiles, and running water—to represent the "unworkable space shield" known as the Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense shield that varying studies estimate could cost from $540 billion to a mind-blowing $6 trillion over 20 years to operate.
With the DC event taking place on April 1, Cohen told those gathered that the problem with the Golden Dome is that "it's not a prank," but rather a real program that Trump is trying pursue despite its deep and obvious flaws.
"Sure, you know, an invisible shield that protects you from any possible threat, is a nice idea," said Cohen, "but it's full of holes."
"This is not defense, it's deception—an illusion of safety," Cohen continued. "The Pentagon has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last several decades proving that this freaking thing doesn't work, but it's just such an attractive fantasy that it's being pulled out of the trash bins of history to soak the taxpayer once again."
"It's another one of the harebrained ideas that pops out of our president's head every now and then, but the Hole-in-Dome [statue] demonstrates that he's all wet on this one," said Cohen. "The other thing the Hole-in-Dome demonstrates is that our country is under water—we are drowning in debt. And wasting another $4 trillion on a holey dome ain't gonna help, especially when we need that money for Social Security, affordable housing, and healthcare."
The overall message, he said, was that "if we don't stop this boondoggle, we're sunk."
Dr. Igor Moric, a research physicist at the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security, also spoke at the event, explaining how the Golden Dome system—despite Trump's unfounded claims that it will be able to shield the American people from future ballistic missile attacks—runs up against fundamental scientific limits.
“The United States has been building ballistic missile defense, a magical shield against nuclear weapons for over 80 years,” Moric said. “The reality is ballistic missile defense does not work, it cannot work, and it will not work. Space-based missile defense, as envisioned by the Golden Dome, cannot work because of known physical and technological realities limiting what it can do."
According to the Up In Arms website, "Golden Dome would be an enormously expensive system that would not provide an effective defense. It would instead fuel an arms race that would reduce US and international security, and increase the risk of nuclear war."
Dr. Ira Helfand, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Back from the Brink campaign, noted that even "optimistic scenarios" of success by a Golden Dome system would not prevent catastrophic consequences, warning that even if the system could intercept 80% of incoming weapons, tens of millions of Americans could still be killed in a large-scale nuclear attack.
“This system does not protect the American people,” he says. “The attempt to build this system will fuel the arms race and torpedo efforts to actually get rid of [nuclear] weapons."
Other speakers focused on the need to use precious tax dollars not for unrealistic and unworkable weapons like Golden Dome, but rather to invest in social programs—including education, Social Security, healthcare, and affordable housing—that the nation desperately needs.
“The Golden Dome is not golden for the people of the United States or the world,” said former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, who also spoke at the event.
People in Cleveland and other US cities, Turner said, would “much rather have the money that is being wasted on a pipe dream and a fantasy invested in lifting them and their children out of poverty.”
“There is a connection between this foolishness and folly and the reason we can't have nice things in the United States of America," added Turner. "They tell us they can't afford universal healthcare, but they can afford this!"
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Just Say No to Trump's Bloody New Deal
In an era of illegal wars and dangerous domestic military operations, Trump’s budget plan would hand trillions of additional dollars to defense contractors and militarize our country in ways not seen since World War II.
Mar 23, 2026
Congress expects to receive the Trump administration’s official budget request for fiscal year 2027 sometime next week. If it is consistent with President Donald Trump’s “announcement” on Truth Social on January 8 that his administration would request a defense budget of $1.5 trillion—$600 billion more than this year—that would be a whopping 66% increase in military spending.
If passed and sustained, analysis shows the plan will add almost $6 trillion to the national debt in the next decade. In an era of illegal wars and dangerous domestic military operations, Trump’s plan would hand trillions of additional dollars to defense contractors and militarize our country in ways not seen since World War II—what we might call a “Bloody New Deal.”
A Level of Spending With Almost No Precedent
The original New Deal took place over six years in the 1930s and infused the US economy with government spending to end the Great Depression. It cost $41.7 billion at the time, translating to around $1 trillion in today’s dollars. Given the comparatively small size of the US economy in the 1930s, the New Deal remains one of the largest economic stimulus packages in US history (if not the largest).
Among modern spending packages, the Bloody New Deal would stand alone in scope. If enacted and sustained over the next 10 years, it will cost roughly six times as much as President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (although many of its provisions have been rolled back by the Trump administration since this cost estimate), four times as much as President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and twice as much as President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Even though Trump has claimed he will use tariff revenue to pay for his spending increase—now in question due to the recent Supreme Court decision striking down most of his tariffs—the Bloody New Deal will add at least $5.8 trillion dollars to the national debt over the next decade, which will harm our financial security and long-term warfighting ability. And that figure is based on a rosy outlook for tariff revenue and a conservative outlook of defense spending growth.
Pouring funds into a defense sector that has repeatedly failed basic tests of accountability will not miraculously produce innovation.
By comparing this massive spending plan to other options, the potential scope of President Trump’s announcement becomes even clearer. For $6 trillion over 10 years, the US government could simultaneously fund all the following:
- More than 750,000 new registered nurses
- 11.5 million new public housing units
- 1 million new elementary school teachers
- 6 million people receiving paid parental leave
- 5.9 million new Head Start slots for children
What would the Bloody New Deal’s billions get us?
While the president was, as usual, frustratingly vague when announcing the largest single increase in US defense spending, congressional Republicans have recently provided more clues about what they would fund and how long this increase would last. The chair of the House Armed Services Committee has indicated the funding will be used to grow the “defense industrial base” and Trump’s pet projects, the missile defense scheme “Golden Dome” and the Navy modernization project “Golden Fleet.”
Growing the industrial base for our military has been a long-term bipartisan priority in Congress. Almost all new military acquisition projects this century have struggled with brittle supply chains and out-of-date procurement practices that could be helped by a stronger industrial base. But this goal either means a one-time increase would be a fool’s errand, unable to solve the problem, or an admission that the spending increase would be made permanent, as some House Republicans have already called for. On a very basic and intuitive level, long-term capacity cannot be created without long-term funding commitments to the defense industry.
Setting aside all the wasted money on infeasible fantasy projects like Golden Dome and Golden Fleet, the Bloody New Deal, even if sustained, won’t fix the problems it sets out to solve. A host of structural issues, not a lack of funding, have caused a failure in output from our defense industrial base.
One of these issues, monopolization, provides an example of something that cannot be fixed with more funds. Both former President Biden’s and President Trump’s defense appointees have pointed out that the shrinking number of contractors has kneecapped our ability to produce military equipment due to a lack of competition, anti-competitive behavior, and contractor influence in Congress. In the 1990s, there were 51 major defense contractors. Today, there are only five.
The Bloody New Deal would likely cause a temporary feeding frenzy for new entrants into the defense sector in its first year like that seen in the massive Golden Dome bidding process currently underway. But history has shown the market will likely reward existing firms when all is said and done. After 9/11, rapid-procurement authorities and emergency funding briefly pulled hundreds of non-traditional firms into defense contracting before mergers and closures quickly narrowed the field again.
In the end, it is likely the Bloody New Deal will only grow the power of incumbent contractors. Even the Pentagon has signaled it wouldn’t know how to deal with this amount of money if it was passed. In 10 years, the largest increase in discretionary spending in modern US history could very well be regarded as the largest corporate welfare plan for defense contractors and arms salesmen, not remembered for making anyone more secure.
Now Is the Time for Opposition
For a spending plan of potentially unparalleled scope, the lack of attention it has received is shocking. If this Bloody New Deal actually passes, it could give unparalleled increases in financial power to defense contractors and support for the political work they already do to influence Congress. The Trump administration may also try to get a rumored $200 billion supplemental defense spending package through Congress to support its ongoing war against Iran. Although this is a different way of increasing the defense budget, the outcome would be much the same.
Sane voices need to act now, building opposition to this unprecedented plan. Especially in the context of attacks decrying President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act as too expensive or unrealistic, and all of the work the current administration has done to undermine that bill, this infeasible proposal becomes all the more ludicrous. Progressives should be unflinching in defining this proposal as a blank check for the same contractors who cannot deliver ships on time, munitions at scale, or clean audits. Pouring funds into a defense sector that has repeatedly failed basic tests of accountability will not miraculously produce innovation.
As the Trump administration makes clear its unchecked willingness to attack other countries regardless of legality, the stakes of dumping unprecedented funds into the US military-industrial complex have never been higher.
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Trump's 'Bomb Magnet' Fleet Could 'Never Sail' and Waste Billions of Dollars: Experts
"A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water," said one critic.
Dec 26, 2025
President Donald Trump on Monday announced that the US Navy is building a new class of warship that will be named after him—but naval warfare experts are warning the project looks like a wasteful boondoggle.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote an analysis of the Trump-branded ships the day after their announcement in which he bluntly predicted that they "will never sail."
Among other things, Cancian argued that the ship being commissioned by the president "will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower."
As if that weren't enough, Cancian projected that "a future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water."
Dan Grazier, a senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center, also predicted doom for Trump's prized ships, which he said would be too overloaded with the latest cutting-edge technology to be effective at naval combat.
"Every gadget you add to one of these systems is one more thing that can break," Grazier wrote in an analysis published by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. "When designers lack discipline, as they obviously did while sketching out this latest future boondoggle, a simple mathematical truth asserts itself."
In fact, Grazier felt so confident in his gloomy prognostication for Trump's warships that he told readers they could "take it to the bank."
"The Navy will spend tens of billions of dollars over the course of the next decade on the Trump-class program," he wrote. "At best, the Navy will receive three troublesome ships that will cost more than $10 billion each before then entire scheme is abandoned."
William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, flagged a particularly troubling detail of Trump's warship plan in a lengthy analysis published by Forbes on Thursday.
"The most troubling aspect of the proposed Trump-class ships is that they are supposed to carry sea-launched nuclear armed cruise missiles," Hartung explained. "The last thing the US military needs is yet another way to deliver nuclear weapons. And because nuclear-armed cruise missiles are difficult to tell from cruise missiles armed with nonnuclear bombs, there is a danger that and adversary could mistake an attack with a nonnuclear armed missile with a nuclear attack, with devastating consequences."
Hartung also pointed out that the ships, which are projected to cost billions each, are not the only pricey weapons system that Trump is planning to build, as earlier this year he vowed to build a "Golden Dome" missile defense system that is projected to cost anywhere from $292 billion and $3.6 trillion.
"It’s time for Congress to do its oversight job and slow down these 'golden' programs until the administration can make a plausible case that they can be both affordable and effective," Hartung concluded. "The odds are against them."
Bernard Loo, senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said in an interview with CNBC that Trump's proposed ships appear to be "a prestige project more than anything else."
Loo argued that the proposed ships' massive size, with each projected to displace more than 35,000 tons while measuring more than 840 feet, would make each vessel a "bomb magnet" for adversaries.
"The size and the prestige value of it all make it an even more tempting target," Loo added.
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