Assistant Secretary of Defense Jules Hurst finally revealed the Pentagon’s estimated price tag for the U.S. military onslaught in Iran—and it’s a doozy. “We’re spending about $25 billion on Operation Epic Fury,” Hurst said during a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday. “Most of that is in munitions, there’s part of that obviously is [Operations and Maintenance] and equipment replacement.” under questioning from Rep. Smith, a DoD official estimates the cost of the Iran war so far is $25 billion pic.twitter.com/aDzsLXIkpB— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 29, 2026Hurst confirmed the Pentagon planned to develop a supplemental funding request through the White House once they had made a “full assessment of the cost of the conflict.” The Department of Defense has previously asked the White House for $200 billion for the war.Washington state Democrat and Ranking Member Adam Smith, who’d asked the Pentagon representatives to eventually provide an estimate, appeared surprised to get such an immediate response. “I’m glad you’ve answered that question because we’ve been asking for a hell of a long time and no one’s given us that number,” he said.As Trump’s military campaign in Iran has neared the 60-day mark, the Pentagon has neglected to deliver real cost estimates since it claimed to have spent more than $11.3 billion in the first six days alone. Every dollar spent on Trump’s war has come from American taxpayers, and was spent without congressional approval. The American Center for Progress previously estimated that the war had reached a $25 billion price tag at the end of March. For context, the group estimated that with that amount of money, the U.S. government could for one entire year pay for Medicare coverage for 3,106,000 people, or provide 29,614,000 children with free school lunches, or shelter 3,147,000 people in Section 8 housing.Instead, Trump chose to spend it on weapons, all while telling Americans there wasn’t enough money for childcare, Medicaid, or Medicare. For the amount of money the Pentagon has spent on this war, the government could have provided 1,780,000 children with free childcare for a year.In the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”