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President Donald Trump’s military occupations of American cities have already cost taxpayers half a billion dollars, according to a new report released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. This unprecedented militarization of America could cost more than $1 billion this year if current domestic deployments continue.
During his second term, Trump has deployed active-duty troops and National Guard members to occupy six Democratic-led cities to quell dissent, assist anti-immigration efforts, protect federal buildings and personnel, or address crime. After repeated setbacks in federal courts and the Supreme Court’s refusal to allow a military occupation of Chicago, the Trump administration withdrew forces from California, Oregon, and Illinois earlier this month. Troops are still deployed in D.C., Memphis, and New Orleans. Two hundred members of the Texas National Guard also remain on standby for deployment. These ongoing operations will cost $93 million per month in 2026, according to the CBO.
The cost of the D.C. occupation, alone, is projected to exceed $660 million this year if it runs through December, as is expected by the CBO. While that deployment was supposed to address supposed surging crime, troops were repeatedly tasked with rousting the homeless, cleaning up parks, and painting over graffiti. Trump even advanced baseless claims that U.S. forces battled members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on the streets of the capital.
“Our military budget is not a slush fund for the President to carry out his political stunts,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told The Intercept. “Our National Guard and Marines are needed to respond to natural disasters and national security threats. Ripping them away from their homes, jobs, and families in pursuit of a cruel immigration agenda is a disrespect to their service.”
Trump has previously threatened to surge troops into Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies, despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local officials. More recently, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, again — a rarely used federal law which allows the president to deploy the U.S. military or federalize the National Guard for domestic law enforcement — to put down protests in Minneapolis.
Despite the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of the military within the U.S., it has kept even basic details about domestic troop deployments, including the costs, secret.
According to the CBO, Trump’s urban occupations cost about $496 million in 2025. That total includes $223 million for the D.C. deployment and $193 million for Los Angeles.
“They are spending billions to militarize our streets while cutting food aid, healthcare, social services, and labor and environmental protections — at a time of unparalleled wealth inequality.”
Throughout 2025, The Intercept repeatedly provided cost estimates of deployments from the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group. The $473 million price tag derived from open-source information and costs-per-day estimates supplied to The Intercept by the office of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill, offered in November, closely aligns with the analysis provided on Wednesday by the CBO.
“The CBO numbers confirm what invaded and over-policed communities have always known — the U.S. government is invested in control and domination, not caring for people,” said Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, who provided the estimates on the deployment costs. “They are spending billions to militarize our streets while cutting food aid, healthcare, social services, and labor and environmental protections – at a time of unparalleled wealth inequality.”
The CBO’s report was issued in response to an October 17 request from a group of senators, including Warren and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill. “If Donald Trump is burning through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on his authoritarian campaign of intimidation, the American people deserve to know about it,” Duckworth told The Intercept at the time. “Trump’s continued abuse of our military to intimidate Americans in their own neighborhoods — the very same Americans he expects to foot the bill for these deployments — must end immediately.”
Neither the White House nor the War Department returned repeated requests for comment on the CBO report.
