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Among the measures that passed in the last-minute votes overnight was the House Armed Services vote to formally approve President Donald Trump’s demand to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
The vote passed on a party-line vote, even though a few Republicans assumed that it wouldn’t pass.
The Congressional Budget Office report shows that the cost of the name change could be anywhere from a few million to up to $125 million, as cited by Politico defense reporter Connor O’Brien on X.
In September, Trump signed an executive order authorizing the name “Department of War.” Similar to the Kennedy Center, Congress established the Department of Defense and the name. So, Congress would be forced to change the name in the statute. While the congressional vote wouldn’t cost millions, changing signs, stationery, passes, identification badges and a slew of other things to change the name will cost money.
“In CBO’s assessment, it would cost about $10 million for a modest implementation of the order if the name change primarily occurred within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD),” said the CBO. “Those costs would be opportunity costs; that is, they would probably be paid from existing budgets through forbearance of other activities. CBO’s estimate is uncertain because DoD has not provided information about how it plans to implement the order.”
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The CBO explained that the broad implementation of the name change will make it expensive. It “could cost hundreds of millions of dollars depending on how Congress and DOD choose to implement the change.”
that the change would cost about $250 per employee with approximately 3,369 personnel.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense has “roughly 18 directorates” underneath it. “Applying the per-organization average cost of $550,000 to those directorates yields a total of about $10 million,”
“Defense-wide agencies provide support to the services (such as accounting, warehousing, transportation, fuel distribution, health care, and background investigations) but are not part of the services, although many were at one time,” the report continued. “Most defense agencies have ‘defense’ in their name, and that could be changed to ‘war’ with a broad renaming.”
When Trump was campaigning in 2024, he argued in favor of “America First,” saying that he would cut “forever wars.” It has prompted questions as to why he would want to rename the DOD for war if he intended to stop wars.
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