CBO’s Iran War Cost Estimate Excludes Cost of Veterans’ Care and Benefits

WASHINGTON — A new Congressional Budget Office report on the cost of U.S. combat operations against Iran confirms what Ranking Member Mark Takano (D-Calif.) has been warning for months: the government's war-cost accounting still doesn't include the veterans that war creates.

CBO estimates the Department of Defense (DoD) has spent $38.1 billion on Operation Epic Fury through August 1, covering munitions, lost equipment, flight hours, and fuel. But the report states plainly that the estimate "does not assign financial costs to U.S. military personnel killed or injured in the conflict, nor does it include longer-term costs associated with future increases in outlays for veterans' health care and disability compensation."

CBO also noted that DoD did not respond to its requests for information, leaving the agency to build its estimate from public reporting alone.

Ranking Member Takano released the following statement:

"CBO just confirmed what I've been saying since this war started: the $38 billion figure is the cost of fighting it so far—not the lifetime cost of caring for the men and women who fight it. That number doesn’t account for the future healthcare and benefits owed to servicemembers who come home injured, sick, or carrying toxic exposure or blast exposure that follows them for the rest of their lives.

We've run this play before. It took Congress until 2022 and decades of veterans dying until the PACT Act finally extended care and benefits to generations of veterans—from Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan.The government should have been budgeting for this from the start. DoD wouldn't even answer CBO's questions for this report. If the Department won't account for veterans' care now, while the war is still active and the bill is still small, Congress will be writing another PACT Act in twenty years to cover a debt it was warned about today."

Takano has called on the DoD to provide congress an estimate of the anticipated veterans' health care and disability compensation line in every future cost update it provides to Congress—not simply the immediate cost of weapons, fuel, and operations.

###

• Print
• Email
• Tweet