A new report estimates that President Donald Trump’s controversial decision to deploy National Guard troops to multiple U.S. cities over the past year has cost taxpayers nearly $500 million.
Since June, the Trump Administration has deployed federal troops to six U.S. cities: , , , , , and . The deployments, which the President has argued were needed to crack down on crime, have , and from local and , as well as residents.
A report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), released on Wednesday, attaches a significant cost to the controversy: The office estimates that the Trump Administration’s deployment of troops to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Portland, and Chicago through December cost approximately $496 million. The New Orleans deployment, which occurred toward the end of December, is not included in that estimate.
Moreover, if the federal government continues these deployments at the same scale as at the end of 2025, the CBO estimates it would cost taxpayers roughly $93 million per month. Depending on the local cost of living, deploying 1,000 federal troops to a city this year could cost between approximately $18 million and $21 million monthly.
The CBO acknowledges some uncertainty in its estimate, though.
“The costs of those or other future deployments are highly uncertain, primarily because the scale, duration, and location of such deployments are hard to predict precisely,” the CBO states in its report. “This uncertainty is further compounded by legal challenges, which have halted deployments to some cities, and by changes in the Administration’s policies.”
On December 23, the Supreme Court prevented Trump from deploying National Guard troops to Chicago after Illinois leaders opposed the deployment. A week later, the President announced his Administration would withdraw troops from L.A., Portland, and Chicago—though he did not rule out the possibility of redeploying them.
“We will return, perhaps in a far different and more robust form, when crime starts to surge again—it’s only a matter of time!” the President stated in a on Truth Social on December 31.
Most of the areas where the Trump Administration deployed troops last year are governed by Democratic politicians who opposed the deployments and criticized the President’s characterization of their communities as crime-ridden. Several leaders against the Trump Administration over the matter.
The CBO, which produced the report at the request of Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, calculated the cost based on expenses for military pay and benefits during troop mobilization, as well as costs for housing, food, and transportation when troops are deployed away from their home base.
Merkley’s office reacted to the report’s findings on Wednesday, describing the Trump Administration’s deployment of federal troops to U.S. cities as a “startling waste of taxpayer dollars.”
“The American people have a right to know how many hundreds of millions of their hard-earned dollars have been and are being squandered on Trump’s reckless and haphazard deployment of National Guard troops to Portland and cities nationwide,” Merkley, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, stated in a . “Trump is weaponizing taxpayer funds to illegally tighten his authoritarian hold on our communities. This must stop.”
Among the five cities analyzed by the CBO, the deployment in Washington, D.C., was the costliest, totaling $223 million through the end of December. At the height of the deployment, approximately 2,950 federal troops were in the nation’s capital. The report projects that continuing the deployment there could cost taxpayers an additional $55 million monthly.
The L.A. deployment was the second-costliest, costing taxpayers $193 million, according to the CBO. The California city had the highest number of troops: At the peak of the deployment, there were roughly 4,900 troops there.
The report follows just a few weeks after the CBO estimated that rebranding the Department of Defense to the “Department of War,” as ordered by the President, roughly $125 million.
