The Trump administration’s deployment of troops to six different U.S. cities last year cost roughly $496 million through the end of December, according to estimates released by the Congressional Budget Office this week.
Keeping Guard forces deployed at the same levels as late December could cost about $93 million per month going forward, the nonpartisan office estimated.
The Pentagon in June 2025 deployed 700 active-duty Marines and members of the National Guard to Los Angeles following protests over the administration’s immigration raids. Since then, members of the National Guard have deployed to Washington, D.C.; Memphis, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Illinois; and New Orleans, Louisiana. And about 200 members of the Texas National Guard are on standby for potential domestic deployments.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reviewed all of the mobilizations, except for New Orleans because it’s a more recent development, after a request from Democratic senators, including Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee.
“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.
The Pentagon told CBS News it had nothing to provide when asked if it had separate estimates.
The deployment to Los Angeles largely ended last summer, but 100 members of the National Guard were mobilized until the end of the year. As of Jan. 21, they had returned home.
Legal challenges prevented members of the National Guard from carrying out their intended missions in Portland and Chicago, but that does not reduce costs, according to the CBO, because members “who are mobilized and awaiting deployment while away from their home stations incur essentially the same costs as deployed personnel.” Both of those deployments ended officially on Jan. 21 when the military announced the guardsmen had demobilized.
The deployment to D.C., which is expected to last through much of 2026, could cost around $55 million per month if the size of the deployment continues at about 2,950 members. As of Thursday, there are 2,677 members of the guard deployed in D.C.
Congressional Budget Office 
The CBO estimates that, in general, deploying 1,000 members of the National Guard to any city would cost $18 to $21 million per month, depending mainly on the city’s cost of living. The cost of continuing to keep 200 members of the Texas National Guard on standby for potential domestic deployments is estimated to cost about $4 million per month.
The major costs the CBO looked at included military pay and benefits like health care, lodging, food, and transportation costs. The office did not expect heavy costs for equipment since the deployments “appear to mainly involve foot patrols conducted by small units.”
The CBO said the costs of deployments in the future are “highly uncertain” because it’s hard to predict the scale or potential legal challenges that have stopped deployments to some cities.
