The Cost of Trump's War

Over the course of the first 15 days of March 2026, there were continuing reports of how much the U.S. was spending on the war in Iran. I extracted them out of yesterday's BlueSky round-up to post them together so I could see how they escalated:

Preliminary Pentagon cost estimate of the war in Iran is $1 BILLION a day. So far.
Leah McElrath

My university received a few years ago the promise of the largest single gift to a public university in U.S. history. It was equivalent to 12 hours of bombing Iran.
Anise K. Strong

The Pentagon calculated it was spending $1 billion a day on Trump and Netanyahu’s war. The truth? It was $3 billion…and that’s just for munitions. Plus they’ve alarmed everyone by burning through scarce munitions in a matter of days.
Mark Chadbourn

The Pentagon used $5.6 billion in munitions in the first days of its assault on Iran, according to officials. The Trump administration is also expected to request a supplemental defense budget of potentially tens of billions of dollars, officials said. 
The Washington Post

That’s more than half the annual budget of the National Science Foundation.
David Ho

First 6 Days of Iran War Cost U.S. $11.3 Billion, Pentagon Says (NYT). The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion. 
David Ho

As usual, I would say that we should not believe any of the numbers put out by the Trump regime, but these dollar figures at least give us something react to. They seem to have settled on $2 billion a day. 

We know that these figures only include direct costs like munitions: not the costs of the military personnel or ships that are in use. For sure these amounts do not include the build-up that was underway before they started flinging missiles at Iran.

The Pentagon, in general, is unauditable, so no one will ever know what any of this really costs. The Intercept has government sources who say the total cost will be somewhere between $60 and $250 billion, depending on duration. 

Those are only direct financial costs to the U.S., of course. Nothing about the cost of human lives in Iran or elsewhere, and the general economic effect from this misbegotten "excursion" undertaken so Trump could be seen as a war president.