President Donald Trump's deployments of U.S. military personnel to various American cities throughout 2025 came at a hefty cost to U.S. taxpayers, according to a new report.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated on Wednesday that taxpayers had to fork over more than $496 million last year alone for Trump's deployments in just a small handful of cities. Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman reported that the nearly half a billion-dollar cost broke down to tens of millions of dollars per month.
"Continuing the deployments at their end-of-2025 size would cost about $93 million per month, and looking ahead, deploying 1,000 National Guard personnel to a U.S. city in 2026 would cost $18 million to $21 million per month, depending largely on local cost-of-living differences," the CBO estimate read, according to Sherman.
Last year, Trump deployed National Guard troops to Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, California; Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans, Louisiana and Washington D.C. Troops in D.C. spent most of their time picking up trash and cleaning up public parks.
In November, a gunman shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard outside of the Farragut West Metro station, killing one and critically injuring another. The shooter was found to be an Afghani national who drove to D.C. from Washington state to carry out the attack.
