‘I am certain’: Harvard policy expert warns the true cost of the Iran war to U.S. taxpayers will exceed $1 trillion

Following the 2003 Iraq war, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected the U.S. had spent $500 billion in direct costs on the conflict, but economics and policy experts Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes begged to differ. In a 2006 study, they calculated the war was in fact four times as expensive as what the CBO had calculated, costing U.S. taxpayers more than $2 trillion in their moderate estimate. In 2013, Bilmes revised the costs and concluded about $4 trillion to $6 trillion was spent on both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

The U.S. is once again locked in conflict in the Middle East, and Bilmes, a Harvard Kennedy School public policy lecturer and author of “The Ghost Budget: U.S. War Spending and Fiscal Transparency,” is once again sounding the alarm on the true cost of war. 

“I am certain we will spend $1 trillion for the Iran war,” she said in an interview this month at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Perhaps we have already racked up that amount.”

Bilmes’s 13-figure estimation dwarfs initial projections of spending on the conflict, at $1 billion per day. The Pentagon told Congress the first week of t...