The global engagement advocates at the Atlantic Council are pressing for clarity on the Pentagon’s Golden Dome initiative, which they say is a program in search of a definition.
Before debating whether the high-tech missile shield costs $185 billion or $1.2 trillion, the Defense Department and Congress need to agree on what the system is supposed to do — and be honest about what it cannot do, the organization said in a new analysis.
A clearly scoped, incrementally demonstrable program is achievable; a political deadline-driven moonshot risks becoming the most expensive procurement failure in American history, the authors of the Atlantic Council said.
This divide between Congress and the Pentagon is likely because of the number of space-based interceptors needed to make the system work, they said, but the program’s supporters need to get on the same page soon.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Golden Dome will cost $1.2 trillion, while the Pentagon put out a figure of $185 billion. The program director of the Golden Dome, Michael Guetlein, responded that the CBO “is not estimating what I’m building.”
“This level of misalignment across defense budget decision makers is highly unusual and while many aspects surrounding Golden Dome remain unclear, one thing is certain: If the program is to have a productive future, the Department of Defense, Congress, and the broader administration will need to get on the same page quickly,” the Atlantic Council wrote.
The gap in the numbers, the Atlantic Council says, is because space-based interceptors “in low-earth orbit are constantly moving.”
According to its analysis, the U.S. requires thousands of them positioned globally just to have a few overhead at the right moment during a missile’s boost phase.
“To be effective against an attack of fifty to one hundred missiles, thousands or tens of thousands of SBIs would be needed, amounting to a potentially withering total cost,” the report said.
“With each SBI constantly circling the globe in low-earth orbit, very few of them would be near a specific missile launch area when the missile was fired.”
The CBO estimates nearly 8,000 SBIs to defend against just 10 incoming missiles. Scale that to a serious Russian or Chinese strike, and the numbers become almost incomprehensible — and the CBO still says even that wouldn’t stop a large-scale attack.
Campaign to oust DNC Chair Ken Martin
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee launched a grassroots phone-in blitz urging Democratic Party state chairmen to call on Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin to resign.
The PCCC, following an overnight survey of 1,207 members, found that 95% of the Democrats want Mr. Martin to step down after he released the widely criticized DNC 2024 autopsy last week.
“The DNC autopsy fiasco is bigger than one bad report,” said Maria Langholz, PCCC’s director of strategic campaigns. “It reflects a deeper distrust of the entire Democratic establishment that continually circles the wagons around weak leadership and out-of-touch ideas.”
“The same political instincts that elevated Ken Martin also defended Joe Biden running for a second term, protected corporate PAC money at the DNC, and put fingers on the scale for uninspiring establishment candidates over the change candidates like Graham Platner and Abdul El-Sayed that voters are hungry for.”
Major shift seen in financial policies for Illegal Immigrants
President Trump’s order “Restoring Integrity to America’s Financial System” is a major shift toward restoring immigration enforcement and protecting the integrity of the financial system, according to analyses from the Center for Immigration Studies.
CIS Senior Legal Fellow George Fishman argued that post-9/11 Treasury regulations, which made foreign consular IDs acceptable for opening bank accounts, circumvented Congress’s intent in the PATRIOT Act and gave undocumented immigrants broad access to the banking system.
A popular ID for this, he said, is Mexico’s “matrícula consular” card.
“President Trump says ‘no más’ to policies that helped illegal aliens remain in the United States for decades,” Mr. Fishman said.
Major banks, encouraged by Treasury rules and profit incentives, expanded financial services to millions of illegal aliens despite obvious security and fraud concerns, he said.
Another analysis by CIS Fellow in Law and Policy Andrew Arthur found that the executive order rolled back Biden-era policies that deterred lenders from considering immigration status when evaluating creditworthiness.
This included even issuing “vague threats to lenders who dared to consider whether would-be alien borrowers might be deported when denying loans.”
“Trump is now telling banks they must consider whether borrowers who might be deported tomorrow will pay off their loans in the future,” Mr. Arthur wrote.
Moves afoot to make post-1986 machine guns legal
Gun Owners of America threw their support behind legislation that would roll back the Hughes Amendment, which banned the sale of automatic firearms manufactured after 1986.
The legislation, proposed by Rep. Jimmy Patronis, Florida Republican, is titled the “Firearm Freedom Act.”
The Hughes Amendment is the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, specifically the provision added by Democratic Rep. William Hughes of New Jersey that amended the National Firearms Act.
The provision banned civilian ownership of any machine gun manufactured after May 19, 1986. Machine guns registered before that date can be legally owned by civilians, but no new ones can enter the civilian registry.
As a result of the ban, a finite supply of legal civilian machine guns was created, causing the prices for pre-1986 machine guns to skyrocket due to scarcity. Guns that cost a few hundred dollars in the 1980s now commonly sell for $5,000 to $50,000.
• The Advocates column is a weekly look at the political action players who drive the debate and shape policy outcomes in Washington. Send tips to theadvocates@washingtontimes.com.
