Trump’s National Guard deployments costing $117.5 million a month
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Even when courts blocked guard units from carrying out their assigned duties in Portland and Chicago, the troops still had to be paid, housed and fed while awaiting orders.
PHOTO: REUTERS
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to US cities cost taxpayers at least US$496 million (S$626.9 million) in 2025 – with the price tag rising to a rate of US$93 million a month, according to a new accounting from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
The analysis covers guard and active-duty deployments to Los Angeles, Washington, Memphis, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, many of which the White House deemed necessary to protect federal personnel or restore order. It does not cover a late-December deployment to New Orleans
While some of those missions have since wound down or been blocked by courts, others remain open-ended.
One of the most visible deployments, in Washington
Even when courts blocked guard units from carrying out their assigned duties in Portland and Chicago, the troops still had to be paid, housed and fed while awaiting orders.
CBO’s accounting shows how costs can quickly compound. Once guard members are federalised, they receive full active-duty pay and benefits – roughly US$95,000 a year per person. That does not include the 700 Marines in Los Angeles, who are already receiving active-duty pay.
Expenses depend on city-specific federal per diem rates, spanning from US$129 a day in Memphis to US$196 in Washington. Meals range from $74 to $92. And transportation – including both from the guard unit’s home state and within the city once they arrive – cost about $34 per guardsman per day.
The result: Deploying 1,000 Guard members to a city costs between US$18 million and US$21 million a month, depending largely on local cost-of-living differences.
“The costs of those or other deployments in the future are highly uncertain, mainly because the scale, length, and location of such deployments are difficult to predict accurately,” CBO director Phillip Swagel said in a letter to Congress.
The deployments also carry uncertain long-term costs. CBO did not attempt to quantify longer-term veterans’ benefits tied to federal service, or the costs of injuries.
The Pentagon and the White House Office of Management and Budget did not immediately respond to the report.
“The American people deserve to know how many hundreds of millions of their hard-earned dollars have been and are being wasted on Trump’s reckless and haphazard deployment of National Guard troops to Portland and cities across the country,” Senator Jeff Merkley, the Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate Budget Committee and requested the report, said in a statement.
“Trump is weaponising taxpayer funds to illegally tighten his authoritarian grip on our communities,” Mr Merkley said. “It must end.” BLOOMBERG
