President Donald Trump’s ambitious Golden Dome missile-defense initiative is hitting severe turbulence, with the 43-day government shutdown and the absence of a formal spending plan for its first $25 billion derailing early progress. Multiple administration officials, defense-industry executives and congressional aides told Reuters the program is stalled at a moment when Trump promised rapid advancement and full deployment by 2028.
Sources said the shutdown froze hiring and diverted key personnel from contract approvals, compounding a more fundamental problem: the nearly $25 billion appropriated this summer has yet to be mapped into a concrete spending blueprint. Two administration officials, a Capitol Hill source and industry executives told Reuters that the absence of this plan prevents the Pentagon from moving Golden Dome from design to execution. A U.S. official familiar with the project said the effort is not “going horribly,” but acknowledged slow progress.
Reuters interviewed more than a dozen people in the administration, Pentagon, Congress and the defense industry who described a program struggling under the weight of its aggressive timeline. A formal spending plan, originally due to Congress in August, is now expected in December. Defense-contracting delays—common in major weapons programs—have become far more consequential under Trump’s compressed schedule, raising fears that critical contracts will miss the Pentagon’s internal December 31 deadline. Four industry executives warned Reuters that slipping the deadline could inflate costs and disrupt the current budget structure.
The White House insists the hurdles are normal growing pains for a project of this magnitude, calling Golden Dome a “next-generational technology” that requires painstaking coordination. The Pentagon, guarding details closely, said it is protecting the program’s strategic value from adversaries intent on exploiting breakthroughs. But senior leaders including Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg and program manager General Michael Guetlein declined to comment.
Guetlein met his mid-November requirement to submit an implementation plan, which is now under review. But sources inside the administration told Reuters the underlying architecture remains unsettled, delaying contract awards for satellites, interceptors, ground systems and the network infrastructure that would link them. Without finalized architecture, a spending plan or contracting authority, the program remains unable to “move from planning to rapid execution,” according to a U.S. official and several industry executives.
Internally, Golden Dome is also struggling to staff up. The Pentagon office has yet to meet its 30-person target and recently lost a key technical director from U.S. Space Command. A replacement has been identified, but the transition adds to the turmoil. Guetlein has pulled in help from missile-defense experts at facilities such as Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, but one weapons-security expert told Reuters that without high-level decisiveness, even a four-star general “can break glass” only so far.
Beyond bureaucracy, the program faces skepticism from prospective contractors who are worried about the enormous upfront costs required to enter the competition. Documents reviewed by Reuters show companies must fund development of four types of space-based interceptors—with little federal cost-sharing and only the promise of prize-pool reimbursements and future production contracts. One executive at a major defense firm told Reuters they may decline to participate altogether, fearing both the expense and the possibility that the next administration abandons the program. While production awards could eventually reach up to $3.4 billion per year, industry officials estimate it could cost $200 million to $2 billion just to build and test a single interceptor.
Major contractors including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX and Boeing are expected to bid once contracts open, but uncertainty hangs over every stage of development. Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute estimated a fully robust missile-defense network could cost as much as $3.6 trillion over 20 years, far beyond the $175 billion Trump initially touted.
Even so, some progress is emerging. U.S. officials and industry sources said the Pentagon is successfully unifying disparate early-warning systems across intelligence agencies, merging satellite surveillance, hacking operations and battlefield intelligence into a streamlined pipeline that Golden Dome could eventually use to detect and intercept ballistic, hypersonic and cruise-missile threats.
For now, however, the Golden Dome remains stuck in planning limbo—ambitious, costly and uncertain—its future hinging on decisions still being written, rewritten and delayed deep inside the Pentagon.
