The US spent $11.3bn on just the first week of its military assault on Iran. This huge expenditure dwarves the annual budgets of many of the public health and scientific agencies the Trump administration has sought to cut, raising stark questions about the country’s priorities.
In the six days that followed the US and Israel’s joint attack on Iran on 28 February, $11.3bn was spent on American taxpayer-funded bombs that hit the country and caused hundreds of deaths, the Pentagon has told lawmakers. This figure does not capture the full cost of the conflict, such as deployment of forces, and will now be far higher given the ongoing nature of the war.
But even the limited snapshot of the financial cost of the war has underscored the enormous disparity between the amount spent by the US on its military compared with the budgets of agencies tasked to keep Americans’ air clean, help find new cures for cancer and devise new scientific innovations.
The cost of the first week of the Iran war would be more than enough to fully fund the Environmental Protection Agency this year (at $8.8bn), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ($9.2bn) or the National Cancer Institute ($7.4bn). The $11.3bn is also more than the total amount allocated this year for federal scientific research funding, via the National Science Foundation.
“This just shows a disturbing prioritization of militarism over the health and welfare of the American public,” said Adam Gaffney, a professor at Harvard Medical School who has studied the health impacts of the administration’s policies.
“With that money, we could be doubling public health expenditures or doubling environmental protections ensuring that Americans have clean air and water. We could bring healthcare to millions of Americans. Instead, we are putting that money into a war of choice.”
The Trump administration has sought to shrink the budgets of the US’s public health and science agencies even further, proposing drastic reductions of more than 50% to the budgets of the EPA and the NSF this year.
Congress, which is tasked by the US constitution to oversee public spending as well as declarations of war, has balked at the White House’s planned cuts, however, passing spending bills this year with roughly similar expenditures for these agencies as previous budget levels.
Some Democrats have said that the Department of Defense, which has an annual budget of more than $900bn, has enough money even with the huge outlay in Iran. “The military has all the funding it needs for this conflict,” Adam Schiff said on NBC on Sunday.
“All of these billions, this $11bn within just the first few days, is money that could’ve gone into new hospitals and into new schools, into healthcare for people, for meeting the needs of the American people.”
Last year, the administration started a purge of what it deemed wasteful spending, an effort spearheaded by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge). This involved the firing of swaths of agency staff and scientists, the tearing-up of thousands of research grants funding work ranging from clean energy development to cancer cures and the blacklisting of initiatives deemed to be ideologically discordant with Trump’s worldview.
“There will be zero tolerance of any waste and abuse,” Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the EPA said last year as he announced the end of what he called “irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left, activist groups” via various grants.
Scientists have warned that this agenda will worsen problems such as pollution, imperil the US’s reputation as a scientific leader and choke off new breakthroughs that can aid the public and lead to lucrative commercialization. Some researchers have already fled the US, raising alarm over a “brain drain” of scientific talent.
“The Trump administration’s broadside against the American research enterprise has been deeply disturbing,” said Gaffney.
“It’s not just funding cuts, it’s the politicization of science, the grants no longer funded and the broader attack on science and evidence, such as RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine theories. This turn towards a dark-ages mentality by this administration is very concerning.”
The administration is reorienting scientific funding on a set of major priorities and seeking “a smaller number of big ‘moonshot’ approaches” such as a breakthrough in fusion energy, said Arthur Daemmrich, director of the Arizona State University consortium for science, policy and outcomes.
Trump has also signed an order for the US to return to the moon and then on to Mars. This endeavor is assigned to Nasa, an agency that Congress handed a $24.4bn budget for this year – an amount equal to about two weeks’ of waging war on Iran.
“Concerns about the military crowding out other research or the general orientation of US science have been raised repeatedly since the 1920s,” said Daemmrich. “For many decades, the US pursued both military-based research and development and civilian, spread across a dozen agencies and with little coordination.”
The weight of funding shifted further towards the military in the wake of the second world war, Daemmrich said, with the Pentagon’s budget now routinely one of the largest expenditures, along with social security, in overall US government spending.
The amount spent on the Iran war has been particularly eye-catching to researchers who have seen their own federal funding cut. Last year, Tammie Visintainer, an associate professor of science education at San José State University, saw two NSF grants, together worth about $500,000, deleted by the administration in its effort to stamp out any funded research with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) connotations.
This “extremely jarring” decision ended four years of work to bolster student participation rates in Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and to measure the urban heat island effect in cities, Visintainer said. The latter project was gathering temperature data that would ultimately help cities adapt to rising temperatures spurred by the climate crisis.
“Budgets are values, and this war is just more evidence that the cuts were never about the money,” Visintainer said. “If you wanted to save money, the military would be the first place to look. This was really about undermining science and anything that doesn’t support their big donors and big oil.”
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” she added. “I mean, one-hundredth of a Tomahawk missile could pay for all of these agencies. It could’ve funded a lot of research. Instead, this money is used to kill Iranian schoolgirls.”
The White House was contacted for comment.
