The bean-counters at the Department of Defense — admittedly not the best bean-counters in the federal government — have tallied up the cost of President Donald Trump’s unilateral military incursion into Iran.
The first week of the conflict, they estimate, ran up a bill for U.S. taxpayers of somewhere around $11 billion, though they admit this is more of a ballpark number than a hard-and-fast calculation. It is probably safe to assume that any error in their calculations is leading them to underestimate the cost rather than to overstate it.
Much of that cost was incurred in the form of munitions. The missiles and bombs that have been pounding Iran since the first attacks on Feb. 28 each carry substantial price tags. Add in the time of the pilots and operators carrying out the strikes — and then the costs of their support teams and vehicles — and it’s clear how quickly costs can add up.
To the administration, of course, all of this is very much worth it. Trump and his Cabinet have been unable to present a consistent, clear explanation for why the war against Iran needed to be undertaken or why it needs to continue. But this lack of strategic vision is shoved into the shadows by the tactical success of the strikes (save the occasional obliteration of a school full of children). You may disagree with the president’s presentations about the necessity of attacking, but you can’t disagree that, at this point, the attacks themselves seem to be effective. Put another way: It may not be clear what we’re doing in Iran, but we sure are doing it well!
So to Trump, that $11 billion is $11 billion well spent, a manifestation of an otherwise elusive success. Average Americans, on the other hand, would be forgiven for wondering if all of that money was worth what we’re getting — which, so far, is international opprobrium and higher gas prices.
You are certainly aware that $11 billion is a lot of money. If you bought a $50,000 car every day, $11 billion would be enough to cover your habit for more than 600 years. Put another way, $11 billion would cover the estimated weekly income of every household in this entire swath of counties — a swath that includes both Phoenix and Las Vegas.
Or, to use another perspective, the one-week total for the Iran war effort would be enough to pay the cumulative weekly income of every household in these counties. They are home to nearly 20 million people.
You would be forgiven for forgetting that President Trump returned to office last year pledging to dramatically slash government spending. He appointed Elon Musk to lead an initiative that ripped through government agencies, ending contracts and cutting grants that were deemed to be unnecessary — by Musk and his team, at least. They even kept a running tally of how much the government had “saved” through their efforts, a database that makes up for its frequent inaccuracies with a user-friendly interface.
Looking just at the 2,500 grants that yielded the biggest purported savings, for example, we can see that the administration canceled 122 grants centered on expanding epidemiology and laboratory capacity for efforts to control infectious diseases. The “savings” from those cuts? A total of $8.76 billion — less than the cost of a week of bombing Iran.
Musk’s team cut a grant aimed at increasing the reliability of California’s electrical grid ($630 million), a program aimed at developing therapies for Covid-19 ($717 million) and a polio and immunization program through the World Health Organization ($781 million). More than 50 grants aimed at addressing substance abuse were also slashed, with an estimated savings of $622 million. The database lists 136 canceled grants that centered on “immunization and vaccines for children,” cancellations that the administration estimates saved $1.87 billion. That’s about 850 Tomahawk missiles, so who’s to say which is a better investment? That $11 billion figure was also only for the first week of the war, from Feb. 28 to March 7, or thereabouts. It seems safe to assume that the total spent in Iran has by now topped the $14 billion cut from USAID in those 2,500 largest grants. And, again, this is only grants. The administration’s alleged cuts also include another $61 billion saved by ending contracts — enough to fund the war in Iran for a month or two, it seems. There are various other ways to express that initial $11 billion, of course. It’s just under the $12 billion in income tax paid in 2022 from the 51.7 million returns of those reporting $30,000 or less in income. It’s $3 billion more than is needed to cover the monthly benefits for every recipient of food assistance, for example. It could have paid the annual Medicaid costs for 1.2 million people in 2023. It is enough to cover more than five months of NASA’s annual budget. Instead, the federal government has spent that $11 billion on the war Trump decided to launch against Iran, generating an awful lot of video clips for social media jokes, but relatively little progress toward whatever nebulous outcome the president hopes to achieve. A grainy animation of a building blowing up may come at a steep economic cost, but can you really put a price on retweets, likes and shares?
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor. 
