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golden dome
We Need a Department of Peace, Not $1.5 Trillion for More War
Holding peace as an organizing principle? Developing policies that promote peaceful resolution of conflict? Can you imagine this at the core to the American government? With significant funding?
May 14, 2026
It’s hard to avoid noticing, and internally screaming over, the Trump administration’s proposed military budget upgrade to $1.5 trillion annually—as though the present trillion-dollar annual gift to the end of the world weren’t enough.
It’s not just the proposed taxpayer bleed. It’s the collective assumption that “self-defense” requires an ever-present readiness to kill lots of people—and beyond that the utter certainty that we have soulless enemies out there who want what we have, hate our freedoms, and will take what they can the moment we relax. This is just the way it is. No questions allowed.
And our enemies aren’t pussycats. One of them, for instance, is China. Indeed, as Megan Russell of CODEPINK writes:
US lawmakers have been using China as a military budget increaser and ultimate policy-generator for years. Competition with Beijing is invoked to justify military expansion, new regional alliances, AI weapons development, semiconductor restrictions, and rising nuclear expenditures. In Washington, framing a policy as necessary to "counter China" has become one of the quickest ways to secure bipartisan support. As a result, the "China threat" rhetoric proliferates while the military budget skyrockets.
“A quick way to secure bipartisan support”—that says it all. Nothing holds a country together like a good enemy. This is who we are; this is the identity we’re stuck with. We unify when we fight. Apparently that’s at our political core, which is why any cries for peace—which is oh, so complex—are ignored, belittled, and virtually always voted down. All of which is to our own detriment, not to mention the world’s detriment.
As Russell notes:
...currently, the US and China are building their own tech ecosystems, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and quantum computing. The US refers to this as a "strategic rivalry" with wider national security implications. This perspective only exists because China is considered a rival. China does not have to be considered a rival. China could just as easily be considered a development partner. And indeed it should, because cooperation on tech is the only potential avenue for ensuring the continued existence of the planet.
Uh, too bad, Planet Earth. Collective humanity refuses to think at that level. Technology serves only our belief in dominance. Consider President Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” nuclear defense system: thousands of satellites patrolling the planet, on the lookout for enemy nuclear missiles, a deeply flawed reincarnation of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative plan that went nowhere. The cost, though minimized by the Trump administration, could wind up, according to some estimates, amounting to well over $3 trillion.
And, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense:
Pursuing Golden Dome also poses serious strategic risks, including the potential to accelerate nuclear arms and space arms races and to undermine opportunities to secure verifiable arms control agreements that reduce the nuclear threat. The program has also raised troubling conflict-of-interest concerns involving individuals within the Trump administration and companies vying for Golden Dome contracts.
Wars. Sometimes you stop ’em, sometimes you start ’em, but they ain’t going away. The most powerful people on the planet are utterly committed to the limited nature of their thinking. That’s just how it goes. What about that do you not understand, Rep. Kucinich?
Remember US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and his Department of Peace legislation, which he introduced in Congress every year from 2001 to 2011? And it was introduced again in 2013 by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). It, uh, never passed.
Here’s how it was defined in 2001, as HR2458:
Establishes a Department of Peace, which shall be headed by a Secretary of Peace appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate. Sets forth the mission of the Department, including to: (1) hold peace as an organizing principle; (2) endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights; and (3) develop policies that promote national and international conflict prevention, nonviolent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict.
Establishes in the Department the Intergovernmental Advisory Council on Peace, which shall provide assistance and make recommendations to the Secretary and the President concerning intergovernmental policies relating to peace and nonviolent conflict resolution.
Holding peace as an organizing principle? Developing policies that promote peaceful resolution of conflict? Can you imagine this at the core to the American government? With significant funding? As I read these words today, I feel compelled to help keep them alive. I want that level of sanity in my government—that level of commitment to something I believe in, with all my heart.
Instead:
Taken together, the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions point to a clear conclusion about its recent request for a whopping $1.5 trillion in military spending: This is not a defense budget. It is a war budget, designed to enable a pattern of aggressive military action and escalating threats that are already imposing a devastating toll on civilians abroad, while the combination of spending cuts and rising costs imposed on Americans is deepening injustice at home.
This is Scott Paul, writing at The Hill. He goes on: “This budget is certainly not business as usual. It is a dramatic reordering of national priorities. Trump has made this shift explicit, arguing that the US cannot afford childcare, Medicaid or Medicare because, as he put it, ‘we’re fighting wars.’”
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Trump's 'Golden Dome' Shield Exposed as 'Trillion-Dollar Boondoggle' by CBO
Sen. Jeff Merkley called the project “nothing more than a massive giveaway to defense contractors paid for entirely by working Americans.”
May 12, 2026
The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday released a report estimating that President Donald Trump's proposed "Golden Dome" missile defense system would cost $1.2 trillion to create, deploy, and operate over the first 20 years of its existence.
The CBO report projects that acquisition costs for the proposed national missile defense (NMD) system would account for the vast majority of the $1.2 trillion total, including "costs for the system’s major components—namely, the interceptor layers and a space-based missile warning and tracking system."
In fact, the report says that the NMD system's space-based interceptor layer will be so expensive that it "accounts for about 70% of acquisition costs and 60% of total costs."
The CBO also questioned whether this massive investment would successfully protect the US from a foreign missile attack.
"Although the notional NMD system... would be far more capable than defenses the United States fields today," the report states, "it would not be an impenetrable shield or be able to fully counter a large attack of the sort that Russia or China might be able to launch."
"The strategic consequences of deploying an NMD system with the capacity considered here are unclear," the report continues, "because they hinge on an adversary’s perception of the defense's capability and how that adversary chose to respond."
The CBO's estimate on the missile system's cost was nearly seven times the projection Trump made last year, when he said it would cost just $175 billion.
And because the US Department of Defense still hasn't delivered key details about the proposed system, the CBO wrote, it is currently "impossible to estimate the long-term cost" of the initiative.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a longtime critic of the "Golden Dome" proposal, said the CBO report shows the Trump-backed project is "nothing more than a massive giveaway to defense contractors paid for entirely by working Americans."
"Just like the president’s symbolic renaming of the Department of Defense or deploying National Guard troops to our cities," added Merkley, who is the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, "this move to fund the ‘Golden Dome’ will be far more effective at squandering money than protecting American lives."
The Oregon Democrat vowed to "continue to work with my colleagues in the Senate to prevent another dime from flowing to this racket."
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), also a longtime critic of the president's proposed missile system, wrote in a social media post that "Trump’s Golden Dome is a $1.2 trillion golden sieve that won’t stop a nuclear attack, but will balloon the deficit and boost the bottom lines of billionaires."
Tommy Vietor, former National Security Council staffer under President Barack Obama and current co-host of Pod Save America, was even blunter in his criticism of the "Golden Dome" plan.
"$1.2 TRILLION for this dumb fucking Golden Dome missile defense system," he wrote in a social media post. "The initial estimate was $175 billion! Madness. No one wants this."
Daniel Larison, contributing editor at Antiwar.com and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine, wrote that the CBO report exposed Trump's dome as a "trillion-dollar boondoggle."
Trump has said that he was inspired to develop such a missile system after being impressed by Israel’s “Iron Dome," despite the fact that Israel has a vastly smaller landmass to defend compared to the US and has historically faced far more danger from missile and rocket attacks.
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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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