Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., didn’t hold back on Thursday when taking aim at the Trump administration’s lack of transparency regarding one of President Trump’s more ambitious priorities: building out the Golden Dome missile defense project.
“Nobody on this committee knows what Golden Dome is,” said Rep. Smith, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, during a hearing on June 12.
The Golden Dome program was launched by a January 27 executive order, which tasked the Department of Defense (DoD) with creating a “next-generation missile defense shield” designed to counter hypersonic weapons and other advanced threats.
Last month, Trump told reporters the system would be “up and running” by 2028.
“We have officially selected the architecture for this state-of-the-art system … This design for Golden Dome will incorporate existing defense capabilities and should be operational before the end of my term. We’ll have it done in about three years,” he said during a press conference in the Oval Office.
Few concrete details have emerged about what the Golden Dome project will entail. Defense officials have offered only broad descriptions, calling it a “multi-layered defense architecture” designed to provide continuous protection against a wide range of evolving threats.
So far, they’ve pointed to components like advanced missile-tracking satellites – such as the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor system – and space-based interceptors as likely building blocks of the system.
“Again, no transparency,” Rep. Smith said. He pressed the administration to provide Congress with clear details on how and where it intends to allocate the billions of dollars already proposed for the project.
The congressman also raised concerns about existing defense programs that may be sidelined or defunded to make room for Trump’s high-concept shield.
“Contained within [Golden Dome], is one of the most important national security threats we face – missile defense and counterthreat. We have a lot of programs that are working on that. What happens to those programs when you take $25 billion towards a project that no one can explain, no one can understand, and again, we don’t have a budget, so we’re taking it on faith—[that’s] deeply troubling,” Rep. Smith warned.
But the administration insists Golden Dome “will integrate with existing defense capabilities.”
President Trump has pegged the total cost of Golden Dome at $175 billion and has included a $25 billion “down payment” in his $1.01 trillion fiscal year 2026 defense budget request for fiscal year 2026. Much of that funding is expected to be funneled into space-based development critical to the system’s future.