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Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, President Donald Trump's so-called Golden Dome for America is the latest reincarnation of President Ronald Reagan's ``Star Wars'' fantasy: thousands of space-based missile interceptors supposedly capable of stopping a missile strike from any adversary anywhere in the world.

President Trump suggests it could protect the United States from a nuclear attack. But in reality, the Golden Dome is fool's gold. It will make us poor, less secure, and more isolated. It is a gold-plated boondoggle that will enrich defense contractors and ignite a new nuclear arms race.

The Golden Dome is a trillion-dollar mistake in the making. It will be much more effective at wasting taxpayer dollars than wasting any missiles. It is a defense contractor's dream and a taxpayer's nightmare.

The potential costs are astronomical. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that even a limited system against just two-- two--incoming missiles, let's just say from the Soviet Union--would require 2,000 space-based interceptors and can cost as much as $542 billion. The American Physical Society estimated that to counter a larger attack of 10 missiles, we would need a system of 40,000 interceptors, costing about $1 trillion. And a system to defend against hundreds of incoming missiles from Russia or China would cost trillions more.

As Senator Tim Sheehy from Montana said, the system ``will likely cost in the trillions, if and when, Golden Dome is completed.''

President Trump has pitched this Golden Dome as a $175 billion project and, so far, Congress has approved $25 billion as part of the reconciliation bill, plus billions more in the Defense authorization bill. And that is just a drop in the bucket. But by the way, the bucket has a hole in the bottom. So this money is just going in and going to waste.

They want to add trillions more to something that won't work; it will make us more vulnerable; the Soviets and the Chinese will be responding; and it is just going to cost more money with less protection for the security of the American people.

Even worse, experts say that Trump's Golden Dome would be ineffective and alarmingly easy to defeat. And these are three main reasons why it would be easy to defeat: First, space-based interceptors, like all satellites, would be sitting ducks for anti-satellite weapons. Russia and China already have anti-satellite weapons they could use to attack our space-based interceptors. And Russia is reportedly developing a nuclear weapon that could be deployed in orbit around the planet and detonated in space to destroy satellites.

We cannot count on space-based interceptors to protect us because in a crisis, one of the first things Moscow and Beijing would do is to destroy them. And we just saw Putin and President Xi shaking hands this past week--just shaking hands.

Second, Moscow and Beijing have already started to develop new systems to get around U.S. defenses, including Russia's nuclear-powered cruise missile and China's fractional orbit bombardment system. Whatever new space-based defense system we deploy, there is a cheaper way for our adversaries to get around it.

Third, Golden Dome would be no match for our adversaries who could overwhelm the system by simply building more and cheaper missiles.

If we build a system to stop 500 missiles, they will field 600 missiles. In fact, the Golden Dome would push Russia and China to do exactly that--expand their arsenals, reject arms control treaties, and plunge the world into a terrifying new nuclear arms race.

Instead of making America safer, we would be inviting a catastrophe, not just for the United States but for the entire world. That is particularly true given that the last remaining U.S.-Russia arms control treaty, New START, will expire in just 6 months, leaving us with no limits on Washington and Moscow's nuclear arsenals for the first time in 50 years--no limits on either country. And China wants to move to catch up fast.

Who benefits? Not the American people, not our troops, not our allies. The real winners are defense contractors. SpaceX, for example, led by Elon Musk, is a frontrunner for Golden Dome contracts.

Meanwhile, even if the system could work in theory, we can't trust the Trump administration to build it. The Pentagon is gutting its independent testing office, the very entity that tells us whether these high-priced systems actually work. The office was targeted specifically to limit scrutiny over Golden Dome because, according to one official, the program has ``to be successful for Mr. Trump.'' So it is going to be in darkness. We won't actually know what is going on because they have to get it done for Mr. Trump.

But that just leads to problems because, ultimately, overconfidence breeds hubris and hubris breeds disaster. That is what they are setting up. That is not national security; that is corruption, pure and simple.

History should have taught us this lesson. We have seen this movie before. The original Reagan-era ``Star Wars'' program burned through $400 billion without producing an effective defense for our country. Forty years later, despite decades of research, technology still can't deliver on the fantasy of a perfect missile shield. Golden Dome is just ``Star Wars'' with a brandnew name but a much higher pricetag for the American taxpayer with the same limited security for our people.

What is worse, it violates decades of bipartisan policy. Since 1999, Congress has agreed that U.S. missile defenses should only be designed to stop limited threats, like those from North Korea, not the much larger nuclear arsenals of major powers like Russia and China.

Golden Dome blows up that carefully drawn line with no plan, no strategy, no regard for the consequences because we shouldn't be kidding ourselves, Russia and China will move. It is only going to make the world more dangerous because the system Donald Trump wants to build will not work.

Golden Dome is science fiction, not effective missile defense system. Systems like Israel's Iron Dome have proven useful against short-range conventional rockets. But deploying weapons in space to counter hundreds of strategic nuclear missiles is not only impractical, it is dangerous.

Republicans already increased defense spending by $150 billion in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. It is not beautiful, though, to trigger a nuclear arms race. It is not beautiful to have paranoia be built into the Russians and Chinese that have been building even more and more nuclear weapons themselves. That is not beautiful for the American people; that is bad for the American people.

GOP really stands for ``Grotesquely Overfunded Pentagon,'' without any effective weapons in their defenses ultimately emanating.

Instead of chasing an impossible dream that risks bankrupting us and destabilizing the world, we should be investing in what actually works: diplomacy, arms control, smart defense. Think of what we could do with $1 trillion instead of wasting it on Golden Dome: fund up to 2,500 new hospitals in the United States--at $60 million apiece, we could have 2,500 new hospitals; forgive the loans of nearly 4 million students-- average student debt is $37,850; cancel medical debt for 68 million Americans--$2,200 a person or at least 230 billion across 100 million Americans. We could get that done. We could help people pay their medical bills. We could build 650,000 affordable housing units in our Nation with that trillion dollars that we are going to waste in outer space. We could build 60,000 new wind turbines to have our electricity come from offshore wind, onshore wind to power our vehicles and the homes which we have in our country. We could provide 37.5 billion meals to school kids across our country. We could fund universal pre-K for the next decade. Congressional Research Service reports from 2021 said it would cost $109 billion over a decade to feed all the kids in America that need food.

We need to fund education, not annihilation; Medicaid not missiles.

It is time Republicans understand the reality that national security also means health, housing, and financial security. But no, the Republicans and Donald Trump want to spend more on a ``Star Wars'' missile defense and the nuclear arsenal, among many other things.

We have seen this Republican playbook before. They claim we must cut spending on education, on healthcare--like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act--on housing, on foreign aid, on climate solutions, but when it comes to defense contractors, they open the purse strings, pouring billions of dollars into the pockets of their well-connected friends.

It is just shameful that they want to cut Medicaid, Medicare, wind, solar, Pell grants for kids to go to school and then say unlimited funding for the Defense Department for a Golden Dome in outer space that is not going to work.

President Trump says his Golden Dome will ``complete the job'' Reagan started. Well, it is not going to complete the job; it is just going to start the same job all over again because it never worked for Ronald Reagan. What it will really do is bury arms control negotiations between the United States and Russia and the Soviet Union. It will balloon the deficit. It will boost the bottom line to billionaires and make our country less safe.

That is why I am offering my ``Golden Dome is Fool's Gold'' amendment to the Defense authorization bill to be considered out here on the Senate floor. No taxpayer dollars should be spent on space-based interceptors until the Secretary of Defense submits to Congress: One, a plan describing Golden Dome and how much it will really cost; two, a certification by the President that Golden Dome won't start a new arms race with Russia and China; three, a written commitment from the Pentagon's testing office that will have the resources it needs to provide effective oversight of a space-based interceptor program; four, an independent technical review by the National Academy of Sciences on the military and cost effectiveness of Golden Dome.

Before we waste a trillion dollars on an outdated idea that history tells us is a fool's errand, we owe it to the American taxpayers to have a plan, to know how much it will cost, and to ensure that it will work. How can anyone oppose this? Anyone who does is not serious about protecting our country. They are selling you fool's gold.

Sadly, we listened to another fool before. We paid $400 billion for Reagan's Star Wars fantasy and got nothing. Are we really going to buy into that same program again?

This is dangerous spending: nuclear weapons we don't need and missile defenses that don't defend but will provoke others into building more nukes and aiming them directly at us. Real security means investing in our hospitals, our pharmacies, our community health centers, our schools, our communities, our climate change response, to a real threat to America and a real threat to the planet--climate change. That is what we should be doing.

Real security means funding public schools, hot meals for students so they can learn and grow.

Real security means tackling the climate crisis head-on--building a clean energy future here at home and breaking the grip of the fossil fuel companies that they have over the Trump administration.

The doomsday that Americans fear in the 21st century isn't being vaporized by a nuclear bomb. It is the doomsday diagnosis of cancer, that is what people are afraid of at home as the Trump administration slashes NIH funding for cancer, for Alzheimer's, for Parkinson's, for diabetes. That is what people are afraid of. That is where the real security is that people want in their homes, where the cures for these diseases are being found--not an evisceration of mRNA research to find a cure for cancer and other diseases.

This medical debt that people are running up, the rent payment that people have to make, the loan payments, the grocery bills, electricity bills--that is what we should be focused on here. That is the real security that people are calling upon the Senate to provide for them.

So let's finally put people before the Pentagon, nurseries before nukes, buses before bombs. Let's not trade real security for a tarnished gold illusion. We must put a stop to this reckless plan before it launches America into the next unwinnable nuclear arms race.

When those Russian missiles are coming across the North Pole aimed at the United States, the least that we should be able to say is that we tried, we really tried to end the nuclear arms race.

That is not what the Golden Dome is going to accomplish. It is going to accomplish just the opposite. It is going to make that nuclear war more likely. It is going to make the Soviet Union and China more paranoid and bring us closer to that day when we see that catastrophic set of mushroom clouds exploding, not just in the United States but all across the planet.

This is the time, this is the place, we are the people here on the Senate floor who have to make the decision to kill this idea before it winds up killing millions of Americans and others around the world.

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