(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s use of federalized National Guard troops in U.S. cities is projected to have cost roughly $496 million last year, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
If current troop levels are maintained, the deployments could cost as much as $1.1 billion this year, according to CBO estimates.
Monthly costs vary widely by location and troop levels, according to the estimate for 2026, ranging from about $6 million for roughly 350 Guard members in New Orleans, to $28 million for 1,500 troops in Memphis, and $55 million for nearly 2,950 personnel in Washington, D.C., though the precise number of troops fluctuates. Some 200 Guardsmen mobilized in Texas are estimated to cost about $4 million a month.
Sen. Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, requested the analysis in October.
“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,” Merkley said in a statement.
Last year, the largest share stemmed from operations in Washington, D.C., at about $223 million, followed by deployments to Los Angeles at $193 million, which included active-duty Marines, and smaller missions in Memphis ($33 million), Portland, Oregon ($26 million), and Chicago ($21 million), according to the CBO.
The estimates include troop pay, hotel lodging and meals. They do not account for longer-term costs, such as education benefits, disability compensation that service members may accrue during the missions, and the use of equipment and military vehicles.
The estimates are further complicated by uncertainty over both the duration and scale of the deployments, according to the CBO report.
“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,” the report said. “That uncertainty is compounded by legal challenges, which have stopped deployments to some cities, and by changes in the Administration’s policies.”
Last summer, Trump deployed federalized troops into several Democratic cities. They were later pulled from cities including Los Angeles and Chicago after the Supreme Court ruled the president lacked sufficient legal justification for the deployments.
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