The Congressional Budget Office has put a price tag on President Donald Trump’s war in Iran: $38 billion and counting.
That’s according to an estimate the nonpartisan office provided to lawmakers Tuesday, evaluating the conflict’s cost to the Pentagon. The figure includes the expense of replacing munitions and equipment lost while fighting, as well as the additional cost of fuel and flight time.
The war, which began Feb. 28, could cost anywhere from $2 to $3 billion per month moving forward — a high price for what Trump insists is not a war but a “small potatoes” conflict.
“As the conflict persists, [the Pentagon’s] costs will continue to increase — slowly if the level of violence remains low and sporadic (as it did in May and June) and rapidly if the intensity of the conflict escalates (as it did in July),” the letter from CBO Director Phillip Swagel concluded.
The office said its analysis was hamstrung by the fact that the Defense Department didn’t respond to its requests for information, leaving researchers to rely on government and press reports.
Crucially, the $38 billion tab does not include the additional costs that U.S. consumers are bearing due to inflation caused by the war. Iran’s throttling of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed gasoline and diesel prices into record territory, rippling through the consumer economy and leading to higher prices in grocery stores.
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Inflation has been “the main economic impact” of the war, Swagel noted, with one price index being .5% higher than he would have estimated in February. Although the report does not put a specific figure on the added fuel costs, researchers from Brown University estimate the burden for U.S. consumers to be $107 billion and counting due to higher gas and diesel prices.
When the U.S. and Israel began the war, Trump said the conflict would be over in a matter of weeks. More than six months later, he is struggling to find a way out as his approval rating has cratered, leaving Republicans facing the possibility of losing both the House and Senate in this fall’s midterm elections.
Trump has tried to downplay the significance of the war, in which 18 U.S. service members have been killed and more than 700 have been injured.
“I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing,” he said earlier this month. “We did Venezuela, and we did this. In Venezuela, we lost nobody, and this we lost 18 people. In Vietnam, you lost 100,000 people, and in other conflicts you lost tens of thousands of people.”
The CBO also found that the war in Iran has hurt the military’s readiness for other potential conflicts.
“The main opportunity cost of the conflict thus far has been the large expenditure of missile defense interceptors, which will leave the United States with a reduced inventory of interceptors for several years,” the letter states.
It added, “The shortfall would become especially problematic if a conflict arose with an opponent whose arsenal included large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles.”