The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its estimate for President Donald Trump’s proposed missile defense program Tuesday, but the media exaggerated the implications of the report’s hypothetical costs while ignoring the program’s value.

Even at the CBO full-blown annual cost of $60 billion, the layered defense system would provide something the U.S. hasn’t enjoyed since 1949 when the Soviets developed the atomic bomb: reduced risk of sudden, undefendable, mass-casualty attack.

“The system would have the capacity to fully engage an attack mounted by a regional adversary (that is, one with limited capabilities, such as North Korea) or a small-scale attack mounted by a peer or near-peer adversary (one with military capabilities similar to those of the United States, namely Russia or China),” said the CBO.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing the development of an Iron Dome missile defense system, also known as the Golden Dome (GDA).

The integrated system is designed to keep the homeland safe from the most catastrophic aerial threats, such as ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles that can deliver conventional or mass casualty warheads.

It’s the very eventuality the U.S. is fighting against as it spends $29 billion (so far in 2026) trying to get Iran to surrender its nuclear and ballistic missile program.

The CBO reported an estimated cost of $1.2 trillion (or $60 billion annually) for GDA, which Reuters claims “dwarfs” the Pentagon’s initial $185 billion estimate.

But Reuters failed to note the CBO report doubled the budget timeline and complicated the system architecture likely proposed by the Pentagon.

Virtually every outlet that followed repeated the same comparison, while few of them told readers the two numbers measure different things.

The Pentagon’s $185 billion covers approximately a decade of deployment, roughly through 2035.

The CBO estimate, on the other hand, covers 20 years, roughly to 2045.

That alone makes a direct comparison difficult.

But the misreporting goes deeper than just the time horizon.

The CBO itself acknowledged in plain language that the Defense Department (DoD) has not publicly released its specific weapon systems and deployment timelines making up the GDA estimates because those details remain classified.

“Details about what and how many systems will be deployed – the ‘objective architecture’ – have not been released,” said the CBO report, “making it impossible to estimate the long-term cost of the GDA system being contemplated by DoD.”

So instead, the report estimated what a system fully envisioned by Trump’s January 2025 executive order would cost to build.

The actual program proposed by the Pentagon is likely more modest in scope than the Trump language suggests.

The core of what is being funded and built includes systems the U.S. already uses such as those deployed during the war against Iran: expanded ground-based mid-course defense systems, advanced radar arrays, additional Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Patriot batteries, with some money proposed for advanced next-generation interceptors, which would likely be in the budget anyway.

What’s included in the Trump executive order, but not likely in the Pentagon’s estimate, is the space-based systems.

Those systems account for more than half the CBO’s $1.2 trillion price tag.

“The most expensive component is the space-based interceptor layer, which accounts for about 70 percent of acquisition costs and 60 percent of total costs,” the CBO said.

The CBO’s price assumes a constellation of 7,800 satellites in low Earth orbit capable of engaging ballistic missiles within the first three to five minutes of flight.

Gen. Michael Guetlein, the program’s director, told Congress last month that the Pentagon will not pursue space-based interceptors at scale unless costs can be controlled, Politico reported.

“If we cannot do it affordably, we will not go into production,” he said.

Strip out the space-based interceptor layer, and the CBO numbers tell a completely different story.

“If the space-based interceptors were deleted from CBO’s notional NMD system, the system’s 20-year cost would drop to $448 billion,” the report states.

This is $22 billion per year versus the Pentagon’s $185 billion over 10 years, which works out to $18.5 billion annually.

Still, the press reported a trillion-dollar gap between the Pentagon and the CBO.

The actual gap, even if the speculative satellite layer stays in, is a rounding error at the scale of the $950 billion annual defense budget.

And as the CBO admits, the DoD may also get funding from existing accounts, such as the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) to fund the GDA.

The MDA, for example, already spends approximately $13 billion per year for research and sustaining existing ground-based interceptors, Aegis BMD systems, THAAD batteries and their radar networks.

The CBO said MDA also has “$12.4 billion in research and development funds” in 2027 that may cover some costs included in the CBO estimate.

That’s $12 billion of doubt annually in just one defense program that could add up to $240 billion over 20 years, which the CBO counted twice.

As it readily admits, the CBO simply doesn’t know what the system will cost.