Elon Musk and his company SpaceX were set to win big from Trump’s planned “Golden Dome” missile defense system. Then Musk went to war with Trump over the Big Beautiful Bill Act, the deficit-expanding centerpiece of the president’s domestic agenda. Musk called it a “disgusting abomination.”

The president shot back with a not-so-veiled threat. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump ranted in a post on Truth Social last Thursday.

Experts say that Trump is partly right: Golden Dome itself needs to be terminated, before countless tax dollars are poured into an implausible project that is destined to fail.

“Golden Dome is really more of a political marketing scheme than a carefully thought-out defense program.”

“Golden Dome can certainly go forward without Elon Musk, but it shouldn’t,” William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Intercept. “Once you get past the soaring rhetoric and glossy corporate PR, Golden Dome is really more of a political marketing scheme than a carefully thought-out defense program. The fact that President Trump claims it can be built in three years — when less complex systems like the F-35 [fighter aircraft] have been in development for 23 years and still aren’t fully ready for combat — is one sign that it is not a serious initiative.”

Trump signed an executive order on January 27 that directed the Pentagon to develop a plan for an “Iron Dome for America” — a riff on the name of Israel’s anti-missile defense system — which the president, who has a penchant for all things gilded, calls the Golden Dome. The plan calls for keeping America safe from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries” or, put more simply, shooting any threat out of the skies before it harms the United States.

The Golden Dome could be the top Pentagon cash cow of the next quarter-century. Its ultimate price tag is estimated in the hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars. 

Experts say that a comprehensive defense against all manner of threats — like intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBMs surrounded by decoys, traveling at 15,000 miles per hour; hypersonic weapons; advanced cruise missiles; and advanced drones; among other threats — is impossible. The challenge of intercepting ICBMs, alone, has been compared to hitting a bullet with a bullet — but harder.

Over 70 years, the United States has poured about $400 billion into ballistic missile defense. Trump’s project appears to be little more than a warmed-over version of the 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative, a fanciful Reagan-era program that hoped to shoot down Soviet ICBMs and went nowhere. Golden Dome-type technology does not exist now and will not be “fully operational” in three years as Trump forecast — or even 15 years, according to experts.

“Few of the main challenges have been solved, and many of the hard problems are likely to remain formidable over the 15-year time horizon the study considered,” reads a comprehensive analysis of strategic ballistic missile defense released by the American Physical Society’s Panel on Public Affairs in March. Even a system designed to knock out North Korean missiles in mid-flight “cannot be expected to provide a robust or reliable defense against more than the simplest attacks by a small number of relatively unsophisticated missiles.”

Even if SpaceX isn’t involved following Trump and Musk’s public spat, other defense contractors will step into the breach to construct the unworkable system. “Bottom line, whoever builds or tries to build the so-called Golden Dome is going to fail and waste a lot of taxpayer cash along the way. That hasn’t changed,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. “The technology to knock an ICBM or hypersonic missile out of the sky does not exist, and if, hundreds of billions of dollars later, we manage to come close, our adversaries will just build a better missile.”

Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits over the past two decades, according to a recent Washington Post investigation, and most of that government money has gone to SpaceX. Musk’s companies have 52 ongoing deals with seven government agencies, including the Defense Department. Nearly two-thirds of that $38 billion in government business has come about in the last five years.

SpaceX had emerged as a frontrunner to win crucial parts of the Golden Dome project, which aims to build a network of satellites to detect and track missiles streaking toward the United States. SpaceX currently has, according to many observers, a near-monopoly on the U.S. satellite launch market, and builds both the rockets to carry military payloads into space and satellites that can provide surveillance and targeting technology. The firm is already the top Pentagon supplier of launch services and low-Earth-orbit communications systems.

NASA relies on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket fleet to service the International Space Station. The space agency was also expected to use its Starship rocket to send astronauts to the Moon and eventually to Mars, and put up a brave front in the midst of the Trump–Musk row. “NASA will continue to execute upon the President’s vision for the future of space,” NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens said in a post on X.

In the heat of their spat, Musk tweeted that SpaceX would “immediately” begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft, before rescinding that decision after a random X user urged him and Trump to “cool off.” The president calmed down as well, saying he had made no decisions about canceling contracts with Musk’s companies. “I’d be allowed to do that,” Trump said on Saturday. “But I have, I haven’t given it any thought.” Still, SpaceX’s role in any future Golden Dome gambit remains in doubt.

“The U.S. would only save funds from canceling contracts with Musk’s firms if it doesn’t turn around and pay other contractors to do the same things,” Hartung told The Intercept. “So the ‘billions and billions’ Trump claims could be saved by cutting off SpaceX will more likely be transferred to other contractors.”

Musk spent almost $300 million to elect Trump and other Republican candidates during the 2024 election cycle. Musk became upset when the recipients of his funds began to follow through on their promised agenda: extending and expanding Trump’s tax cuts, which not only disproportionately benefit the rich but will increase the national debt by almost $2.6 trillion, according to expert analyses. The Big, Beautiful Bill Act would also pump money into Trumpian priorities like immigration enforcement while slashing funds for the most vulnerable, like cutting Medicaid benefits.

On Saturday, Trump warned there would be “very serious consequences” if Musk backs candidates to run against Republicans who vote in favor of his signature legislation.

“Contracts should be awarded and canceled by contracting officers based on their merits, not personal relationships,” said Taxpayers for Common Sense’s Murphy. “Anything else leads to waste and corruption.”

The post Trump Threatened to Cut Musk’s Contracts. Golden Dome Deserves Worse. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.