The United States was already on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory, adding to the national debt at breakneck speed, before it launched a joint attack on Iran with Israel.
Even before the first munitions struck Tehran, the federal debt had surged past the $38 trillion mark, even jumping $1 trillion in just over two months between August and October 2025, the fastest rate of accumulation outside the pandemic in history.
Now, President Donald Trump has committed the U.S. to a war with Iran that is draining nearly $1 billion a day from the government’s coffers. With the U.S. borrowing at an accelerating rate, economists and defense analysts are aggressively gaming out the macroeconomic scenarios of a conflict with no clear endgame.
The $1 Billion-a-Day War
Operation Epic Fury is racking up a staggering military bill. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a DC think tank, the military campaign is costing approximately $891.4 million every single day. The first 100 hours of the conflict alone consumed $3.7 billion, CIS added in a report on the costs of the fighting, as reported by CNN.
