What Did They Say?

Sep 17, 2026· Updated

In Two Days the Government's Own Scorekeepers Put a Number on the Iran War — the Pentagon's Inspector General Says the Munitions Spent Have Caused "Strategic Inventory Shortfalls," and the CBO Says the War Has Cost $38 Billion and Will Add Half a Point to Inflation — While Trump Posts That America Is "Producing More Exquisite and Elite Weapons Than at Any Time in Our History"

On Sept. 14, 2026, the Defense Department's inspector general delivered its first congressionally mandated report on Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran that began in late February. Covering Feb. 28 through June 30, the report put the cost to the Pentagon and State Department at $33.4 billion, $22.3 billion of it in expended munitions, and found that "the munitions expenditure on OEF has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply." It also documented that Iranian strikes damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan — the first formal public accounting of American losses in the war. The next day, Sept. 15, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its own estimate: the war has directly cost the Pentagon more than $38 billion through the beginning of August and is on pace to consume $2 billion to $3 billion more every month. CBO also projected that the war will push inflation roughly 0.5 percentage points higher than previously forecast into the first quarter of 2027, driven largely by reduced oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and disrupted Red Sea shipping. The CBO score was produced at the request of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other Senate Democrats, who had written that "the administration has not been fully truthful or transparent in its public accounting of the war's costs so far" — a concern they tied to an expected administration supplemental funding request of as much as $200 billion. Both reports landed against months of administration assurances to the contrary. Two weeks earlier Trump had said US ammunition stocks were "virtually unlimited"; on Sept. 14, the day the IG report dropped, he posted that the United States is "producing more Exquisite and Elite Weapons than at any time in our History," without addressing the findings. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said the supplemental would wait until after the November midterms.

“Despite asking for tens of billions of additional taxpayer dollars, you have so far failed to provide basic information on how this money has and will be spent. … Congress must have access to this information to carry out our oversight responsibilities. It is the bare minimum that any American would expect in balancing their own household budget.”
Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) · Sep 17, 2026

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