Technology

Largely freed of competition, Golden Dome task orders can go to favored Trump contractors, including high-tech billionaires who are his close allies.

The evidence accumulates that Golden Dome is going to be an enormously costly and extremely wasteful system. And, the contracting for high-tech work seems sure to go to Palantir. Palantir’s board chairman, the extremely well connected billionaire Peter Thiel, longtime Trump-backer and mentor of Vice President J.D. Vance.

In July, a letter by Senator Edward J. Markey and nine other Senators said:

“President Trump has said that Golden Dome would cost $175 billion and be ‘fully operational’ by 2029. But the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that it could cost as much as $542 billion to deploy a constellation of space-based interceptors (SBIs) designed to defeat one or two intercontinental ballistic missiles launched in a limited attack, such as by North Korea. Countering a possible Russian or Chinese attack involving hundreds of warheads would require a much larger, more technologically advanced, and more costly system. . . . Despite what could amount to a trillion dollar investment, Golden Dome would be all-too-easy to defeat.”

Earlier in September, the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), more cheerleader than critic of Trump’s, issued a report that the cost of Golden Dome could range as high as $3.6 trillion. AEI gave a range of possibilities, from that high figure for a system doing what President Trump asserts he wants Golden Dome to do, down to lower figures that while still far above Trump’s $175 billion, would have much more limited capabilities what he claims.

So now that the Administration is launched on procuring Golden Dome, the natural question is, who benefits? Some of the contracting may go to traditional defense contractors like Lockheed Martin. But, the new hallmark of the Trump administration has been the mutually beneficial cultivating of Silicon Valley billionaires. The beauty of Golden Dome is that it involves not just hardware from traditional contractors, but tech products from the Trump Administration’s closest new friends.