Operation Epic Fury's Cost Meets the Cuts He Voted For: $132 Billion in War Costs, $911 Billion in Medicaid Cuts

Why This Matters for NY-23

With a preliminary U.S.-Iran agreement reached in April 2026 — a ceasefire that did not hold, see the September 17, 2026 update below — the cost of Operation Epic Fury — the largest U.S. military offensive since the 2003 invasion of Iraq — is coming into focus. Rep. Langworthy publicly championed that war and urged that funding for it move without delay. This entry places two documented things side by side: the cost of the war he backed, and the federal program cuts he voted for. NY-23 is a rural district where SNAP, Medicaid, and rural hospitals are lifelines, so the question of fiscal priorities is not abstract here.

This is a context-and-priorities entry, not a claim that war money was literally taken from food assistance. Those are separate budget streams. See “A Note on Comparing These Numbers” below.

The Statement

Source: Official statement on Operation Epic Fury (February 28, 2026):

“President Trump has given them numerous chances to deescalate and has successfully built allied relationships with the rest of the Middle East region, who are supportive of the Epic Fury operation… This mission is about protecting our homeland and finishing the job of blocking this murderous regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

In the same statement, he framed funding as urgent:

“It is also a time that we must be extra vigilant on our own soil and Democrats must stop blocking funding for the Department of Homeland Security so it can immediately reopen and be fully operational. Time is of the essence.”

The full statement and its eight factual claims are examined in our companion entry, Operation Epic Fury: Eight Claims Checked Against the Record. This entry focuses only on cost and fiscal priorities.

What the War Has Cost

These figures come from the Pentagon’s own testimony, a private economic-research firm, and a Harvard public-finance economist. They describe three different scopes, not one number added three times.

$29 billion — direct U.S. military cost (and an undercount)

Pentagon comptroller Jules Hurst told the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 12, 2026 that the operation had cost $29 billion in operational costs — $4 billion higher than the administration’s April figure, with the increase attributed to repair and replacement of equipment. Hurst conceded the Pentagon was not yet counting the cost to repair U.S. bases in Kuwait and Bahrain that were struck by Iranian drones and missiles. Update, September 17, 2026: CBO now puts the figure at approximately $38 billion as of August 1, 2026. See the update below. The administration is expected to ask Congress for a supplemental appropriation to cover war costs.

In plain language: $29 billion is the floor, not the ceiling. Base repairs are not in it, and more spending is being requested.

$132 billion — total cost to U.S. consumers and taxpayers so far

Moody’s Analytics estimates the war has cost U.S. consumers and taxpayers about $132 billion so far, with the meter still running (NPR, June 17, 2026). The largest piece is higher energy prices after the near-shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz: gasoline rose from just under $3.00 to a peak of $4.56 a gallon (AAA). At the peak, Americans paid more than half a billion dollars a day in higher pump prices; even after cooling, the wartime surcharge still adds more than $360 million a day.

$1 trillion — projected long-term total

Professor Linda Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School — the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, and co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War — estimates the war “is costing about two billion dollars a day in short-term, upfront costs, which is the tip of the iceberg,” and states: “I am certain we will spend one trillion dollars for the Iran war” (Harvard Kennedy School, April 7, 2026). This is a long-term, all-in projection (including future costs such as veterans’ care and interest), not money already spent.

The war also carried a human cost: 13 U.S. service members were killed, along with more than 3,300 Iranians, per the figures cited by NPR. Update, September 17, 2026: the toll is higher; twelve senators recorded 18 U.S. deaths as of July 23, 2026. See the update below.

Update — September 17, 2026: CBO Has Now Priced the War, and the Meter Is Still Running

On September 15, 2026, the Congressional Budget Office published “Estimating the Cost of Combat Operations Against Iran,” a letter to House Budget Committee Ranking Member Brendan F. Boyle. It is the first nonpartisan, official accounting of this conflict’s cost, and it supersedes the Pentagon testimony figure this entry used in June. Three things in it change what is written above, and one of them is a correction to this entry.

The federal outlay is now $38 billion, and it grows every month

CBO estimates the conflict has cost the Department of Defense approximately $38 billion as of August 1, 2026 — up from the $29 billion the Pentagon comptroller gave the Senate in May, the figure this entry cited. CBO adds that each further month costs $2 billion at the level of violence seen in May and June, or $3 billion at July’s intensity.

Where that money goes: replacing expended munitions is the largest single component at $21.7 billion, of which $13.1 billion is missile defense interceptors and $7.3 billion land-attack cruise missiles. CBO also notes that in June the administration requested $87.6 billion in supplemental appropriations, $67.1 billion of it for DoD, with $42.3 billion appearing to be directly related to the conflict — about 10 percent more than CBO’s own estimate of what the conflict has cost.

In plain language: the federal bill for this war is about nine billion dollars higher than the number in this entry, and it rises by two to three billion every month it continues.

Correction to this entry: the war did not end in June

This entry opened by saying “a preliminary U.S.-Iran agreement now reached.” That framing did not hold. CBO writes that after the April 8 ceasefire “the conflict has generally become less intense” but that “less intense combat operations are still ongoing.” Fighting resumed in July, as documented in our veterans entry. The House has since voted twice more to end the operation — H.Con.Res. 89 on July 23 (passed 214–208) and H.Con.Res. 93 on September 15 (passed 220–204) — and Langworthy voted No on both, as he has on all eight war powers votes in this series.

The human toll in this entry is also out of date. It cites 13 U.S. service members killed, the figure as of June 18. Twelve senators, writing on July 23, recorded 18 deaths. How casualties and injuries in this operation are being counted is itself formally disputed; that dispute is documented in the veterans entry and is not resolved here.

The consumer-price leg of this entry is no longer just a private estimate

In June this entry relied on Moody’s Analytics for the $132 billion figure covering higher prices paid by consumers. CBO has now reached the same channel independently, and describes the mechanism in its own words: the reduction in oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and disruption of Red Sea shipping “has increased energy prices globally,” and the conflict “has disrupted global refining activities and, consequently, increased the prices of refined petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel.” Because “the price of almost every product reflects shipping costs,” CBO writes, those increases “indirectly affect the prices of most goods and services.”

CBO’s magnitudes:

What that looks like at a New York pump. The Energy Information Administration’s weekly series show New York regular gasoline at $2.889 a gallon the week of February 23, 2026 — the last week before the operation began — and $4.339 on September 14, 2026. Diesel for the Central Atlantic region, which includes New York, went from $4.104 to $6.312 over the same span. Both series jumped in the week of March 9, immediately after operations began.

A limit on what those numbers prove, stated plainly. CBO attributes an increment of the price increase to the conflict — 2.3 percentage points of one quarter’s inflation, crude running 41 percent above its own pre-war forecast. It does not attribute the entire $1.45 gasoline increase or the entire $2.21 diesel increase to the war, and neither does this entry. Fuel prices move for many reasons. What CBO establishes is the direction, the mechanism, and a measurable share.

In plain language: a nonpartisan federal agency now says this war raised the price of gasoline, diesel and, through shipping costs, most other goods. In a rural district that runs on diesel — farm equipment, freight, school buses — that is the part of the war’s cost that arrives weekly.

A cost this entry never counted: the interceptors

CBO identifies the main opportunity cost as the expenditure of missile defense interceptors. By comparing reported expenditures against total purchases, CBO concludes the United States “has probably used between one-half and two-thirds of its inventory of those munitions since June 2025,” and that rebuilding the inventory “would probably take at least five years” even if production increased. CBO notes this would matter most in a conflict with an opponent holding large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles, and names the People’s Republic of China.

What CBO could not get, and who says he has the power to get it

CBO states — twice — that “DoD did not respond to CBO’s requests for information.” Its estimates are “subject to considerable uncertainty” as a result. The federal government’s nonpartisan budget scorekeeper, asked by Congress to price a war, was refused the data and had to work from public reporting.

On September 10, 2026, five days before that letter published, Rep. Langworthy said of a development project in Buffalo: “I take the ‘Oversight’ in serving on the House Oversight Committee seriously,” adding in an accompanying interview, “I have oversight over the entire federal government in that respect.” He is a majority member of that committee. What we checked, and what we found. We reviewed the press releases published on his House website through September 17, 2026, and the Congressional Record for September 14, 2026, the day H.Con.Res. 93 was debated for an hour on the floor. We located no statement from him on the cost of this operation, on the Pentagon’s refusal to answer CBO, or on the casualty-count dispute, and he made no remarks in that debate — his name appears in that day’s Record only in vote tallies and in an Extension of Remarks honoring Six Nations Cemetery in the Town of Orange, Schuyler County. We did not have access to committee correspondence that was never made public; this is a search of the public record, not a claim about what exists in a file drawer. See the oversight-attendance entry.

Stated fairly: a war powers resolution is a floor vote available to every member, not a duty of the Oversight Committee, and Oversight is not the primary committee for military casualty policy. The contrast documented here is between the breadth of the oversight authority he claims and the absence of any exercise of it on this subject — not a claim that he neglected a committee assignment.

And what the $38 billion still leaves out

CBO writes that its analysis “does not assign financial costs to U.S. military personnel killed or injured in the conflict, nor does it include longer-term costs associated with future increases in outlays for veterans’ health care and disability compensation.” CBO also cautions that its categories “are not directly comparable or summable,” and that the $38 billion covers the Defense Department only.

In plain language: the headline number leaves out the part that lands on veterans later — the claims, the ratings, the research and the staff who process them. Those are documented in the veterans entry.

Sources added in this update

• Congressional Budget Office, “Estimating the Cost of Combat Operations Against Iran,” Sep. 15, 2026: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62756 (archived) (PDF: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2026-09/62756-Iran.pdf)
• U.S. Energy Information Administration, New York All Grades All Formulations Retail Gasoline Prices, weekly: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epmr_pte_sny_dpg&f=W
• U.S. Energy Information Administration, Central Atlantic (PADD 1B) No. 2 Diesel Ultra Low Sulfur Retail Prices, weekly: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emd_epd2dxl0_pte_r1y_dpg&f=W
• U.S. House Clerk, Roll Call 307, Sep. 15, 2026 (H.Con.Res. 93, passed 220–204): https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2026/roll307.xml (archived)

A note on archiving these sources. The CBO report page and PDF, House Clerk Roll Call 307, 38 U.S.C. §101 and the Jerusalem Post article were captured to the Wayback Machine and verified by playback on September 17, 2026. Four could not be: the two EIA price series (the only captures predate the September 2026 figures cited here), the Congressional Record page E903, and the Telegraph article as syndicated. Save Page Now was rate-limiting at the time of writing. The full retrieved text of every source above is retained in the repository at research/sources/iran-cost-2026-09-17/, and the EIA figures were re-derived from those retained tables before publication.

Update compiled September 17, 2026. Retained source text: research/sources/iran-cost-2026-09-17/.

What He Voted to Cut

Nearly eight months before he championed the war, Langworthy voted YES on H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed 218–214 on July 3, 2025 (Congress.gov).

Note on the Medicaid figure: $911 billion is the reduction in total federal Medicaid spending over ten years (KFF’s allocation of CBO’s score of the enacted law). Some analyses cite $840 billion for the Medicaid provisions alone, or $1.02 trillion including CHIP; this entry uses the broader federal-Medicaid figure, consistent with our Medicaid coverage entry.

Langworthy has repeatedly described the SNAP reductions as nonexistent, stating “not a single dollar is cut from benefits” — a claim the CBO’s $186 billion score contradicts, examined in SNAP Benefits: Claiming ‘Not a Single Dollar Cut’. The Medicaid coverage and rural-hospital consequences are documented in Medicaid Coverage Cuts and Rural Hospitals “Pure Fiction”.

In Steuben County alone, 11,459 residents (about 1 in 8) receive SNAP, and the county manager has confirmed the bill means “less money coming in from the federal SNAP program.” Eight NY-23 hospitals operate at negative margins and are flagged as at-risk under the Medicaid cuts.

A Note on Comparing These Numbers

To keep this fair:

• These are separate budget streams. War costs are funded through the Defense budget and an expected supplemental appropriation; SNAP and Medicaid are mandatory spending under different law. The war’s cost was not literally subtracted from food or health programs. This entry documents priorities and rhetoric, not a dollar-for-dollar transfer.
• The $132 billion is cost to the economy, not all federal outlay. Most of it is higher prices paid by consumers (energy, transport, mortgages), not money the Treasury spent. The federal outlay so far is the $29 billion military figure, which is rising.
• The $1 trillion is a projection, not a bill already paid.

What can be documented is the contrast in how the same representative characterized each: the war’s cost as a necessary price of “protecting our homeland,” with funding that must move because “time is of the essence” — and the domestic cuts as something that did not happen at all.

The Pattern

This fits a pattern documented elsewhere on this site: large federal expenditures are framed as essential and urgent, while domestic safety-net reductions the representative voted for are described as nonexistent or overblown (the “Semantic Deception” and “Create the Problem, Blame Someone Else” patterns). The war he urged Washington to fund without delay is now projected to cost roughly what he voted to cut from Medicaid.

Questions This Raises

1. If “time is of the essence” justified moving funding for the war, what standard applied to the $186 billion in SNAP reductions and $911 billion in Medicaid reductions he voted for?
2. Will the representative support the expected war-cost supplemental appropriation, and if so, how does that square with describing domestic spending as unaffordable?
3. Given that the war is now projected to cost about $1 trillion — close to the Medicaid reduction in H.R. 1 — how does the office reconcile the two as fiscal priorities for a rural district?

Related Fact-Checks

• Operation Epic Fury: Eight Claims Checked Against the Record — the full statement and its factual claims
• DHS Shutdown Claim During Operation Epic Fury — the funding-leverage pivot in the same statement
• SNAP Benefits: ‘Not a Single Dollar Cut’ — the $186 billion SNAP reduction
• Medicaid Coverage Cuts — the $911 billion Medicaid reduction
• Rural Hospitals “Pure Fiction” — at-risk NY-23 hospitals

Sources

War cost:

• NPR: “Here’s how much the Iran war cost — and how its effects will linger” (June 17, 2026) — Moody’s Analytics $132B estimate; Pentagon $29B; gas prices
• Harvard Kennedy School: “Why is the war in Iran so expensive?” (April 7, 2026) — Prof. Linda Bilmes, ~$2B/day and ~$1T projection
• Pentagon comptroller Jules Hurst, Senate Armed Services Committee testimony, May 12, 2026 (as reported by NPR)

Program cuts:

• CBO, Estimated Budgetary Effects of H.R. 1 (enacted law) — $186B SNAP reduction; see our SNAP fact-check for full CBO sourcing
• KFF: How Might Federal Medicaid Cuts in the Enacted Reconciliation Package Affect Rural Areas — $911B total / $137B rural
• Congress.gov: H.R. 1 — Langworthy voted YES (218–214, July 3, 2025)

Statement:

• Rep. Langworthy’s official statement on Operation Epic Fury, February 28, 2026 (documented in our companion entry)

Note: This entry documents publicly available information from Pentagon testimony, nonpartisan and academic economic analysis, the Congressional Budget Office, and the representative’s own statements. War spending and domestic spending are separate budget streams; this entry compares fiscal priorities, not a direct transfer of funds. Readers may draw their own conclusions.

Last updated: September 17, 2026 (CBO cost letter; ceasefire and casualty figures updated).