The Congressional Budget Office has prepared a new account (pdf) of U.S. spending in Iraq in response to a request from Rep. John Spratt (D-SC).
“The Congress has appropriated $432 billion for military operations and other activities related to the war on terrorism since September 2001. According to CBO’s estimates, from the time U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, $290 billion has been allocated for activities in Iraq.”
For reasons explained in the report, the estimates are slightly lower than those prepared recently by the Congressional Research Service (pdf).
See “Estimated Costs of U.S. Operations in Iraq Under Two Specified Scenarios,” Congressional Budget Office, July 13.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.
To unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence within the Department of Health and Human Services, an AI Corps should be established, embedding specialized AI experts within each of the department’s 10 agencies.
Investing in interventions behind the walls is not just a matter of improving conditions for incarcerated individuals—it is a public safety and economic imperative. By reducing recidivism through education and family contact, we can improve reentry outcomes and save billions in taxpayer dollars.
The U.S. government should establish a public-private National Exposome Project (NEP) to generate benchmark human exposure levels for the ~80,000 chemicals to which Americans are regularly exposed.