Trump’s Venezuela, Boat Strike Campaign Have Cost Nearly $5 Billion So Far

The Trump administration’s operations in Latin America over the past seven months have cost nearly $5 billion, finds a new analysis — enough to fund Medicaid for half a million Americans for a year.

Thus far, the combination of the military costs for the deadly raid of Venezuela and abduction of then-President Nicolás Maduro as well as the U.S.’s boat strike and surveillance campaign in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea is at least $4.7 billion, according to an analysis released on Thursday by the Brown University Watson School of International and Public Affairs’s Costs of War project.

Naval deployment is the single most costly factor, the report finds, at $3.8 billion between August of 2025 and March of 2026.

This amount only reflects public information on naval, aircraft, and Special Operations deployment, as well as costs of equipment and munitions used, pulled from the Congressional Budget Office, researchers noted. It does not reflect costs from any covert operations like potential Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) programs that Donald Trump has hinted at.

The “cost estimate would likely increase significantly” if these operations were included, the authors write. Further, the authors note that the “greatest costs may be yet to come,” as the boat strike campaign, which has killed 180 civilians so far, is set to continue indefinitely.

These costs are “enough to fund Medicaid for 500,000 people for an entire year,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, report co-author and director of military analysis for Defense Priorities, to The Intercept. “The United States is not clearly safer or more prosperous as a result of Operation Southern Spear or Operation Absolute Resolve.”

The findings come amid the U.S.’s costly war on Iran, which has cost up to $35 billion, according to an estimate earlier this month by the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

The Trump administration has requested a record-shattering $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2027. This doesn’t include the White House’s supplemental funding request for the war on Iran, which was reported last month to be a staggering $200 billion — even as the administration has repeatedly claimed that the war would be over within a few weeks.

The Trump administration has openly said that Republicans are slashing the U.S.’s welfare spending, including crucial programs like Medicaid, to fund his ever-growing military conquests.

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare,” said Trump in remarks earlier this month. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things…. We’ve got to take care of one thing: military protection.”

At the same time, the war on Iran is directly enacting extra costs to American households.

According to a tracker by the Watson School, the consumer burden of the war thus far adds up to $25.8 billion in terms of rising costs for gasoline and diesel. That amounts to $197 per household for the war that started just two months ago.

Meanwhile, spending on militarism in 2026 already cost the average American taxpayer $4,049 last year, the Institute for Policy Studies found this month. In other words, for 50 days out of a year, an average U.S. worker’s income taxes were wholly paid toward militarism, including 23 days for Pentagon contractors.