Outside analysts’ estimates of the total cost to American taxpayers of President Donald Trump’s war on Iran have varied a lotbut most estimate the number to be higher than the $25 billion offered by the Pentagon.
Iran’s foreign minister on Friday joined analysts in crying foul when he accused him The Pentagon of deliberately misleading the American public with his official estimate that the war against Iran has so far cost him US$25 billion – a number that Iran’s top diplomat said was a fourfold underestimate of the true price of the conflict.
“The Pentagon is lying,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has written IN social media. “(Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu’s gamble has directly cost America $100 billion so far, four times more than claimed. The indirect costs to American taxpayers are much higher. The monthly bill for every American family is $500 and rising fast.”
The Iranian diplomat’s comments came days after acting Pentagon comptroller Jules Hurst told US lawmakers under oath that The Trump administration had spent $25 billion so far on the historically unpopular war of choice.
of New York Times observed that Hurst “did not elaborate on the figure, which was surprisingly smaller than The $200 billion that the Pentagon had originally requested for the conflict and suggested a major slowdown in spending since the start of the war, when officials estimated to have cost more than $11 billion in the first six days.”
The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, evaluated earlier this month that the Pentagon likely spent more than $33 billion during the first 39 days of the conflict. On April 10 ASSESSMENT issued by the conservative American Enterprise Institute after the armistice began put the cost of the war at between $25 billion and $35 billion.
Independent policy analyst Stephen Semler evaluated that the US spent nearly $29 billion on the war in Iran during the first two weeks of the conflict alone – an average of $2.1 billion per day.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “lied to Congress when he said the war in Iran has cost $25 billion,” Semler. has written Thursday on social networks. “It cost more than that in the first two weeks.” His chart is below:
On top of the direct costs of war, lawmakers and experts have pointed to the indirect costs of war in the form of higher gas and food prices paid by American consumers.
US representative Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said on the House floor Thursday that the war in Iran has cost Americans more than $630 billion — or an average of $5,000 per household — “due to the increase in the price of food, the price of gas, the price of electricity.”
“We must end this war now and help the American people reduce costs,” Khanna said.
Linda Bilmes, public policy expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School, said in early April that the cost of Iran’s war to the US is likely to exceed $1 trillion in the long run, when calculated veterans‘ care and other expenses.
“It is difficult to measure the exact cost,” said Bilmes. “But based on what we know now, it’s costing about two billion dollars a day in short-term costs, which is the tip of the iceberg.”
