Neutrality Studies
REVEALED: The INSANE Money Spent On War Contractors
Harry Berger & William Hartung
Published on Apr 8, 2025
As the US provides Israel with billions of dollars and deploys its military in Yemen on behalf of that foreign government, the total cost of supporting Israel continues to rise. But how much have Americans forked over to that foreign government so far? At the same time, the Trump administration has promised to use DOGE to take on government spending, of which military expenditures represent 60%. Last month, Trump said that he would cut the Pentagon budget in half. But has that really happened? To help answer these questions, independent journalist Harrison Berger is joined by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft's William Hartung.
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Sources & Links
Check out the cost of war project:
conomic Costs
Through Fiscal Year 2022, the United States federal government has spent and obligated $8 trillion dollars on the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere. This figure includes: direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care.
This total omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the US economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors; future interest on war borrowing; and local government and private war costs.
Public access to budget information about the post-9/11 is imperfect and incomplete. The scale of spending alone makes it hard to grasp. Public understanding of the budgetary costs of war is further limited by secrecy, faulty accounting and the deferral of current costs.
The current wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing. This borrowing has raised the U.S. budget deficit, increased the national debt and had other macroeconomic effects, such as raising consumer interest rates. Unless the U.S. immediately repays the money borrowed for war, there will also be future interest payments. We estimate that interest payments could total over $6.5 trillion by the 2050s. [...]
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic
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