The Pentagon said Los Angeles would cost $134 million. The bill came to $193 million.

On June 10, 2025, three days after the first Guard units reached Los Angeles, the Pentagon's acting comptroller, Bryn MacDonnell, told a House Appropriations subcommittee the deployment would run 60 days and cost about $134 million.▸ Seven months later, the Congressional Budget Office did the actual accounting: $193 million — 44% over the Pentagon's own number. Los Angeles was only the first of six cities. By the time CBO finished its tally in January 2026, the running total for the year stood at $496 million, and the machine was still running.

CBO's job, at Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Merkley's request, was to price out three things: activating and paying troops, housing and feeding them away from home, and moving them in and out.▸ The result is the first independent, itemized accounting of what "sending the Guard" has actually cost — city by city, not talking point by talking point.

Washington, D.C. is the most expensive line item — $223 million — because it has run the longest and carried the most people.▸ Los Angeles is second at $193 million despite CBO itself noting the mission was "largely completed" within three months. The gap between the Pentagon's $134 million promise and the $193 million reality isn't explained by the deployment running long; it's explained by what a fully loaded Guard member actually costs once housing, food, transport, and accrued benefits are counted at $596 a day, versus the back-of-envelope number a comptroller gives a subcommittee three days into a mission. Memphis, Portland, and Chicago round out the tally at $33 million, $26 million, and $21 million. Add them up and they land on exactly the total CBO reported: $496 million. A seventh cost — New Orleans, activated December 22, 2025, running through February 28, 2026 — isn't in that figure at all; CBO excluded it because the mission started too late in the year to price.

The dollar figure is a proxy for something more direct: how many people have been pulled out of their civilian jobs and into federal service, and for how long.

Los Angeles saw the most people — 4,900, including 700 active-duty Marines — but also the fastest drawdown: by year-end only 100 Guard members remained, and on January 21, 2026 the military announced the mission fully demobilized.▸ Portland and Chicago followed the same arc, wound down the same week. Washington and Memphis didn't. D.C.'s 2,950 Guard members and Memphis's 1,500 were both still fully mobilized at year-end, and neither deployment has a stated end date — Memphis's is the subject of an ongoing state-court challenge, and the Administration has told CBO the D.C. deployment will run at least through the end of 2026. At D.C.'s own $55-million-a-month rate, one city, one more year, comes to $660 million — more than the entire five-city bill for 2025.

That's the shape of the thing: three deployments that behaved like the temporary emergencies they were announced as, and two that didn't. CBO projects that just holding the line at the 5,375 personnel still mobilized as of December 31 will run $93 million a month — annualized, over $1.1 billion, before a single additional city is added.▸ The Administration has also told CBO it wants a standing "quick-reaction force" ready for rapid deployment to more cities, at $18 million to $21 million a month per 1,000 troops. There is no line in the defense budget called "domestic deployments." It's paid for the same way as everything else the Guard does — one city, one mobilization order, one invoice at a time.

All dollar and personnel figures are CBO's own, drawn from Guard housing and subsistence contracts where available and federal per-diem rates where not; New Orleans and the 200 Texas Guard members on standby are tracked separately by CBO and are not included in the five-city totals above.