Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday that President Donald Trump wanted a hefty budget for the start of his "Golden Dome" project, but even Republicans have no idea what's going on with it.
Speaking with Republicans on Capitol Hill, Briana Reilly and Anthony Adragna found that even they don't know what has been done or what will happen in the next year.
The so-called "Golden Dome" is supposed to be similar to the Israeli anti-missile system in place that detects and shoots down any aerial weapons coming into the country. The United States, however, is over 400 times the size of Israel. Part of Trump's reasoning for demanding Greenland become part of the U.S. was the claim that he wanted the dome to stretch all the way there.
That would mean expanding the area under the "Golden Dome" to over 1,000 times the size of Israel.
A report titled Build Your Own Golden Dome: A Framework for Understanding Costs, Choices, and Tradeoffs from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute estimated the cost at anywhere between $252 billion and $3.6 trillion over 20 years.
Thus far, Congress has allocated $23 billion to the Department of Defense. Lawmakers have since been asking what they got for that.
Punchbowl cited Pentagon officials telling the Hill they would speak to Congress about its detailed plans. But that was three months ago. Lawmakers are still waiting.
“I would hope we could have hearings on it — both classified and unclassified — to lay out the plan and also talk about budgets and where the money’s coming from, and how we’re going to integrate technology,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) told Punchbowl.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast (R-Fla.) anticipates there are going to be huge arguments over the project from now on.
“It’s stirring, big debate here,” Mast revealed.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is a top lawmaker on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. Speaking to Punchbowl, she explained that the GOP members were happy to turn over the billions, but they don't know where they have disappeared to.
“I can tell you how much we included within the reconciliation bill for Golden Dome, but in terms of what it exactly means, I think the Congress is still waiting to hear on that as well,” she said. “That’s what I’d like to know.”
One of the biggest fiscal complaints about the Pentagon is that the Defense Department budget has ballooned to $1 trillion only to deliver years late at twice the price.
"Many weapons systems also don’t work too well. The F-35 works less than one-third of the time. The Navy is retiring Littoral Combat Ships decades ahead of schedule because they can’t perform the missions the Navy needs. Army leaders cancelled the Future Combat System without producing a single operational vehicle," wrote Dan Grazier, senior fellow and director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center.