The US Is Spending Billions to Bomb Iran
The Trump administration has spent around $24 billion in public funds on its war against Iran so far. Here’s what that money might have been used for instead.
The $24 billion that the US has spent bombing Iran could have been spent on any number of useful programs instead, from public broadcasting to paid leave to making the child tax credit permanent. (Getty Images)
In the first six days of war on Iran, the Pentagon spent $11.3 billion in taxpayer funds. By its own estimates, it has burned through approximately $1 billion more every day since. That amounts to approximately $24 billion — or more than $41 million an hour, or roughly $11,000 per second.
To understand the scale of such spending, it’s worth looking at what else that money could have paid for. The US Agency for International Development — which led overseas humanitarian efforts until it shut down last year after the Trump administration gutted its programming — oversaw just $35 billion in appropriations in 2024 alone. One Harvard researcher estimates that recent aid lapses have already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad due to disease and malnutrition.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes more than $500 million in federal funds annually to 1,500 public media outlets, including the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), voted to dissolve in January following nearly sixty years in operation. That came after the Trump administration slashed $1.1 billion from its funding for 2026 and 2027 — roughly equivalent to a single day’s worth of fighting in Iran.
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