Alex Brandon/AP Photo
President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill allocates tens of billions of dollars for the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system.
President Trump’s spending bill was supposed to be about trimming the government’s fat to give money back to working families. At least, that’s how the administration has been justifying the unprecedented cuts to social safety net programs like SNAP and Medicaid and the rollbacks of President Biden’s clean-energy policies.
Of course, we know that the bill was never going to cut government spending to give money back to the working class, but if you still need convincing, just take a look at the bill’s defense provisions proposed by the House and Senate.
The House version of the bill proposed $150 billion in new Pentagon spending, and the Senate Armed Services Committee proposed an even higher $156 billion. Since the two chambers are still working out the details ahead of a July 4 deadline from Trump to pass the bill, it’s not clear exactly what the final number will come out to be. Even before those numbers are finalized, though, it is already clear that the bill will cut $300 billion from SNAP and almost $800 billion from Medicaid.
Advocates who follow Pentagon spending and policy are used to exorbitant military spending, but say that this bill goes a step beyond the usual military boosts. “Reconciliation was never meant to be a tool for ramming partisan spending proposals through Congress,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It was supposed to be about balancing the budget, and this bill does the opposite by piling trillions of dollars on the national debt.”
Major military spending typically goes through the normal appropriations process rather than reconciliation, which, as Murphy said, is not supposed to be used to make substantial policy changes, such as recruiting the military to assist with the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. Unlike other legislation, reconciliation bills are not subject to the 60-vote cloture hurdle, which means that it takes just 51 votes—two more than the number of Senate Republicans—to enact them.
This week, the Senate parliamentarian will look through the bill’s provisions to ensure that they all pass muster under the Byrd Rule, which states that any policy changes in reconciliation bills must be “merely incidental” to their accompanying budgetary changes. Some advocates, like Julia Gledhill, a research analyst at the Stimson Center, are skeptical that the provisions in the defense section of the bill will hold up to scrutiny from the Byrd Rule.
“We’re seeing lawmakers employ reconciliation to alter weapons procurement plans and force structure and big things that do require deliberation and a democratic process, it turns out,” Gledhill said. Those larger policy changes would typically be done through the appropriations process.
Another benefit of the normal appropriations process for Pentagon spending is that it’s largely done with bipartisan support. Reconciliation is the complete opposite, and allows the governing party to make budgetary decisions without consulting the minority party. By pushing defense spending through the reconciliation process, Republicans are turning a typically bipartisan issue into a deeply partisan one.
Golden Dome
Trump’s Golden Dome project—a missile defense system like Israel’s Iron Dome—gets tens of billions of dollars in the Big Beautiful Bill. The House allocated $25 billion to the project in the bill, which the Senate didn’t increase. Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Committee released a report accompanying the Pentagon’s spending bill for fiscal year 2026, which allocates an additional $13 billion for the Golden Dome. In that same Appropriations Committee report, they write about the Golden Dome: “To date, the Department of Defense has yet to provide information on what exactly it entails and how it intends to implement Golden Dome or to make the case that it is feasible or affordable.”
Murphy, like many military and science experts, said the Golden Dome will likely not succeed in its goal of protecting the whole country from an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. Unlike Israel’s Iron Dome, which protects the small country from short- and medium-range missiles, the Golden Dome would need to cover the vastness of the U.S. and intercept long-range missiles, requiring space-based technology—a challenge that Israel’s Golden Dome doesn’t have to meet.
“Even if it did at some point succeed, which is a huge if, the very act of pursuing this program will have a destabilizing effect,” Murphy explained. “It will encourage adversaries to expand their offensive and defensive capabilities to maintain a balance of power.”
Companies like Palantir, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing have all thrown their hats in the ring to build and manage the project, which would earn them billions. If the Golden Dome does become operational, it would amount to an unbelievably expensive corporate handout.
Sentinel ICBM
The Golden Dome isn’t the only far-fetched spending in the bill. Senate Republicans assigned $14 billion to modernize the nuclear triad, with a specific focus on the development of the Sentinel ICBM system, which will replace the military’s current land-based nuclear missile system within the next decade. But the Sentinel is already 81 percent over its original budget, and experts say revamping the land-based leg of the nuclear triad doesn’t make sense strategically, since those missiles are more vulnerable to attack than those on submarines or airplanes.
“Nuclear modernization is out of control,” Gledhill said. “You’re modernizing all three legs of the triad right now, and it is strategically foolish and economically irresponsible.”
Defense Industrial Base
After shipbuilding expenses, the largest category of spending in the bill is expanding the country’s defense industrial base capacity, essentially the country’s ability to make enough weapons and provide enough services to the military, particularly during wartime.
This focus on building up the manufacturing capacity of the country isn’t new, and was also a focus of the Biden administration. The desire to build up the industrial capacity for waging war comes as some politicians push the country closer to a hot war with China. But shunting money toward the defense industry might not actually build up manufacturing capacity, due to the rise of shareholder-dominated business practices within the industry’s major corporations—a transformation widespread within American big business.
“There’s no guarantee that investing in production capacity will actually increase production capacity, because military contractors historically spend their money on shareholders and executive compensation,” said Gledhill.
Immigration
And then, of course, there are the immigration provisions in the bill. The House version of the bill includes $5 billion for immigration-related spending, while the Senate bill allocates $3.3 billion for sending troops to the border and detaining migrants in military facilities. Those numbers are on top of tens of billions in immigration enforcement spending proposed by the House Judiciary and House Homeland Security Committees.
My colleague David Dayen has written that these spending provisions could bring ICE raids and crackdowns on protests like those we’ve seen in Los Angeles to more American cities. And from a national-security perspective, sending the military’s personnel and resources to the border distracts them from their actual job descriptions. Many of the bill’s provisions just advance the administration’s goals for an increased military presence domestically, and for more weapons and more spending on the companies they’ve allied with, like Palantir and SpaceX.
“The core rot … here is that the United States refuses to make trade-offs. We need to just do less better, and we can continue to protect ourselves and maintain our ability to deter and protect an attack on us or our allies,” Gledhill said. “But instead, we pretend that we can just throw more money at the problem, and pursue military superiority in every realm forever. That’s just not how it works. No empire has ever been able to do that.”
