Brouhaha Over Iran War Costs To US Taxpayers

The Iranian diplomat's comments came days after the Pentagon's acting comptroller, Jules Hurst, told US lawmakers under oath that the Trump administration had thus far spent $25 billion on the historically unpopular war of choice.

The New York Times observed that Hurst“did not elaborate on the figure, which was strikingly smaller than the $200 billion the Pentagon had initially requested for the conflict and suggested a major slowdown in expenditures since the start of the war, when officials estimated it had cost more than $11 billion in its first six days.”

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, estimated earlier this month that the Pentagon was likely to have spent more than $33 billion during the first 39 days of the conflict. An April 10 assessment released by the conservative American Enterprise Institute after the ceasefire began put the war's cost between $25 billion and $35 billion.

Independent policy analyst Stephen Semler estimated that the US spent nearly $29 billion on the Iran war during just the first two weeks of the conflict – an average of $2.1 billion per day.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth“lied to Congress when he said the Iran war has cost $25 billion,” Semler wrote Thursday on social media.“It cost more than that in the first two weeks.” His chart is below:

On top of direct war spending, lawmakers and experts have pointed to indirect costs of war in the form of higher gas and food prices paid by American consumers.