President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard and active-duty Marine personnel to U.S. cities cost approximately $496 million between June and December last year, according to an estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Continuing the deployment for the next year could cost the nation over $1 billion, the estimate found.
The data was released Wednesday in response to a request from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee. The estimate covers the troops’ deployment over the last six months of 2025, though it excludes a late dispatch to New Orleans.
“Thanks to the Trump Administration’s highly successful efforts to drive down violent crime, cities like Memphis and D.C. are much safer for residents and visitors — with crime dropping across all major categories,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The media should talk to individuals who are able to go about their daily lives without fear of being assaulted, carjacked, or robbed thanks to the Trump Administration.”
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the estimates.
Since June, the Trump administration has sent thousands of National Guard members or active-duty Marine Corps to Los Angeles, D.C., Memphis, Portland, Oregon, and New Orleans.
Trump has repeatedly said his deployments are necessary because local leaders have not done enough to combat crime in major cities. The deployments, however, have been repeatedly challenged in court, and legal experts have warned that Trump may be exceeding his authority.
The budget office estimated that it would cost the government about $93 million a month to maintain deployments nationwide if they continue at the same capacity and size as the ones at the end of 2025. Deploying 1,000 National Guard members to another U.S. city in 2026 would cost between $18 million to $21 million per month, CBO estimated, depending largely on local cost-of-living.
The office said it is difficult to predict further costs because of variations in deployment size, duration, location and legal or policy changes.
“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 Wednesday. “Trump is weaponizing taxpayer funds to illegally tighten his authoritarian grip on our communities. It must end.”
Trump started the tactic on June 7, when he seized control of the California National Guard over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Trump sent approximately 4,000 Guard members to Los Angeles alongside a battalion of about 700 active-duty infantry Marines after protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids turned violent in a few instances.
In August, Trump deployed the Guard to D.C. While the Los Angeles deployment has ended, about 2,500 National Guard troops remain in D.C., and they’re expected to stay there through 2026. Because of D.C.’s unique legal status, Trump has more authority to send Guard troops there without challenge.
In September, Trump authorized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to call the National Guard into Memphis, activating about 1,500 members. The administration has not announced an end to this deployment.
That same month, Hegseth sent National Guard personnel to Portland. A week later, in October, Trump authorized about 300 Illinois National Guard members to be activated in Chicago, alongside 200 members of the Texas National Guard who were sent to Illinois.
Last week, the Pentagon announced that both the Portland and Chicago deployments, like the one in Los Angeles, have been demobilized. Trump said in late December that he would end his efforts to keep troops in those three cities after a 6-3 ruling by the Supreme Court found that the administration had failed to identify a legal way in which the military could “execute the laws in Illinois.”
Still, on Dec. 22, Hegseth activated 350 National Guard personnel in New Orleans, and that deployment is expected to last through Feb. 28. It is not included in CBO’s estimates.
The CBO estimated the troop deployments’ total cost by calculating military pay, benefits, lodging, food and transportation to and from their home stations. U.S. taxpayers are spending an average of $260 per activated troop member per day, or $95,000 per member a year, according to the analysis.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), who was among the Democrats who called for the CBO estimate, said Wednesday that Trump is treating the military budget as a “slush fund” to carry out “political stunts.”
“We need accountability, and this administration must answer for wasting nearly half a billion taxpayer dollars,” Warren said in a statement.
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