There is a particular kind of silence that only a cabinet department can produce. It is the silence of an institution that has decided the question does not deserve an answer. That is the silence the Congressional Budget Office ran into this year when it tried to price out Operation Epic Fury, the American military campaign against Iran that began on February 28, 2026. Ranking Budget Committee Member Brendan Boyle had asked CBO in March for a nonpartisan number. CBO went looking for one. The Department of Defense, according to CBO’s own letter, simply did not respond to the agency’s requests for information.
The Silent Treatment
This is worth sitting with. CBO is not a partisan attack shop; it is the body Congress built specifically so that both parties could agree on a baseline set of facts before arguing about what to do with them. When the agency needed to price out five categories of wartime cost, from expended Tomahawks to increased flying hours, it did not get so much as a courtesy briefing from the department actually fighting the war. Instead, CBO had to reconstruct DoD’s own costs using government databases, public reporting, and a private think tank’s homework, principally a CSIS analysis of munitions inventories that CBO cites as its best available source for how many missiles the Pentagon actually fired. An agency of Congress was reduced to citing a nonprofit’s guesswork about the executive branch’s own arsenal, because the executive branch would not tell it.
CBO is admirably restrained about what this means. It notes, in the driest possible register, that its resulting estimate of $38.1 billion “is subject to considerable uncertainty.” That sentence is doing a great deal of work. It is bureaucratic for “we had to estimate a war.”
Four Different Prices for the Same War
Having built its own number from the wreckage of DoD’s silence, CBO then had the pleasure of comparing it against the three numbers the administration offered instead, none of which agree with each other. In June, the Office of Management and Budget sent House Speaker Mike Johnson a formal request for $87.6 billion in supplemental funding, of which the portion CBO judges directly attributable to the conflict comes to $42.3 billion, about 10 percent above CBO’s own figure. Then, on July 22, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth testified before the Senate that the war had cost $37.5 billion. Two weeks after that, without public explanation, DoD quietly revised its own munitions figure upward from $25 billion to $27.7 billion in a briefing to committee staff, nudging its total higher still.
So Congress has, at various points this year, been handed four figures for the price of the same war: CBO’s $38.1 billion, the administration’s implied $42.3 billion, Hegseth’s sworn $37.5 billion, and DoD’s own quiet revision on top of that.
Outside government, independent estimators landed in roughly the same neighborhood without any of them matching either. CBO’s letter notes that nongovernmental groups tend to publish still-higher totals, generally because they extrapolate from the war’s expensive early days or fold in costs CBO deliberately excluded, and separate think tank tallies circulating this year ranged anywhere from the low thirties to the high forties of billions, depending on which week’s fighting a given analyst used as a baseline. None of these numbers are wild outliers from one another, which is almost the most unsettling part; they are close enough to look authoritative and different enough to be unreconcilable, produced by an executive branch that cannot seem to settle on its own arithmetic even while testifying under oath about it.
A Receipt With Twelve Billion Dollars Redacted
The gap between CBO’s number and the administration’s supplemental request is not just noise, though. Of the $67.1 billion the administration requested for DoD, CBO could only trace $42.3 billion to activity plausibly connected to Operation Epic Fury. The remaining $24.8 billion sits in categories CBO’s letter describes as largely opaque to it, including $5.1 billion for “cybersecurity and autonomy,” $4 billion for something called the Airborne Moving Target Indicator and Space Data Network Backbone, and $12.1 billion filed simply as “other, classified.” CBO goes out of its way to note that prior wartime supplemental requests, for Iraq and Afghanistan, never buried this large a share of the ask behind a classification stamp. A Congressional Research Service review of the same request separately flagged that OMB’s letter and its enclosures did not provide enough detail even for Congress to determine whether some of this money duplicates the department’s ordinary FY2027 budget request, meaning lawmakers may be asked to fund the same missiles twice under two different labels.
Classified line items are standard practice. A classified third of a wartime supplemental is not, and it lands at the exact moment Congress is least equipped to examine it, because the one agency built to do that could not get DoD on the phone.
What the Ledger Won’t Say
CBO’s letter is, in its understated way, a small monument to institutional failure operating at two levels simultaneously. At the surface level, a department at war would not answer basic cost questions from its own legislature’s scorekeeper. Underneath that, the numbers the administration did produce cannot be reconciled with each other, let alone independently verified, and a meaningful fraction of the request has been placed beyond scrutiny entirely. Congress is being asked to appropriate tens of billions of dollars on the strength of a request that its own budget office had to partially reverse-engineer from a think tank report, while a rotating set of official figures drift a few billion dollars apart from each other every few weeks.
Nobody involved has lied, exactly. Nobody involved has really told the whole truth either, and the agency built to notice the difference had to work the case with the lights half off. That is not a small failure of paperwork. It is what happens when the one branch of government legally entitled to ask “what did this cost” gets treated like a nuisance caller, and the answer it eventually publishes has to carry a footnote admitting it is mostly an educated guess about a war still being fought.
Sources: Congressional Budget Office, Cost of Operation Epic Fury (September 2026); Rep. Boyle’s March 2026 CBO request letter; CSIS, Last Rounds: Status of Key Munitions After the Iran War Ceasefire; OMB June 24, 2026 supplemental request to Speaker Johnson; Congressional Research Service, IN12700. See also: The Pentagon’s Own Gas Station Is Losing Money on Every Gallon
