Taxpayer costs rise as U.S. mounts pressure campaign against Venezuela

By Brett Rowland
The Center Square

President Donald Trump’s plans for Venezuela could cost U.S. taxpayers more each day as the military’s most expensive aircraft carrier arrives. The president says the military is saving U.S. lives each time it destroys suspected drug boats in the area.

The U.S. spent about $13 billion to build its newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford. That doesn’t include about $4.7 billion in research and development costs, or the daily operating cost of the strike group.

Operating the carrier and its strike group costs taxpayers about $6.5 million per day, according to a 2013 report from Retired Navy Captain Henry Hendrix for the Center for a New American Security.

Trump’s overall plans for Venezuela remain unclear, but the president has said that he plans to go after drug smuggling.

Experts have suggested that Trump’s campaign could be more about a leadership change in Venezuela than drug smuggling.

Abigail Hall, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and an associate professor of economics at the University of Tampa, said the whole thing amounts to political theater.

“What the ultimate goal is – whether it is to show muscle with respect to drugs and terrorism, or if the goal is something broader, like regime change in Venezuela, that we just frankly don’t know,” Hall told The Center Square. “Venezuela poses no credible threat to the United States.”

Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have destroyed at least 17 boats and one semi-submersible, killing 70 people. Democrats, a few Republicans, and human rights groups have criticized the strikes. The United Nations recently joined in. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called on the U.S. to change course.

“These attacks – and their mounting human cost – are unacceptable,” he said. “The U.S. must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats, whatever the criminal conduct alleged against them.”

Trump sees it differently. The U.S. president said each sunken boat has saved 25,000 American lives from overdoses. While U.S. officials have not publicly released detailed reports about the strikes, the boats appear to be smuggling cocaine. Elsewhere, Trump has focused his war on drugs against fentanyl, a powerful and deadly synthetic opioid. U.S. health officials have reported that synthetic opioids are the leading cause of overdose deaths in the U.S. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported provisional data found about 87,000 drug overdose deaths from October 2023 to September 2024. That’s down from about 114,000 the previous year and the lowest since 2020.

The U.S. campaign against drug smuggling has found some support, including some Republicans and the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar.

“The pain and suffering the cartels have inflicted on our nation is immense,” she said in a statement. “I have no sympathy for traffickers; the U.S. military should kill them all violently.”

Trump is no friend of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who has controlled the South American nation since 2013. International election observers have accused Maduo of consolidating power through fraudulent elections. In 2024, his reelection was widely condemned as illegitimate, with allegations of vote tampering and intimidation of opposition leaders. Maduro is also facing allegations of human rights abuses, corruption, and involvement in illegal drug trafficking. U.S. prosecutors have charged Maduro with running a drug cartel using cocaine trafficking as a tool to run the regime and put a $50 million bounty on information leading to his arrest. Almost eight million people, more than a quarter of the population, have left Venezuela. The U.S. has limited trade relations and has no diplomatic ties with Venezuela, which is aligned with China and Russia.

Hall said Trump’s moves appear to be a show of power.

“It’s a way to illustrate that they are tough on drugs and tough on crime without burning any political capital in South America, because there’s no affection at all between Washington, D.C. and Caracas,” she told The Center Square. “You have a regime that’s already unfriendly to the U.S. We don’t have trade relations with Venezuela, so there’s a relatively low cost to the administration for trying to appear tough on drugs and tough on crime by going after Venezuela and Venezuelan nationals, as opposed to, say, if you were actually looking to target drugs, you might look more closely at, say, Mexico. But when you’re trying to negotiate a trade deal with Mexico, it becomes a much trickier negotiation.”

Trump previously said the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua was using the boats to smuggle drugs to the U.S. He said the strikes would prevent the overdose deaths of Americans.

Hall said Tren de Aragua has about 5,000 members worldwide and no formal command structure. Still, taxpayers are ultimately responsible.

“Certainly, anytime that you’re deploying resources … all of those things are costly,” she told The Center Square. “So certainly these things are costing American taxpayers, but I would be very suspicious of any claims that they are somehow making the U.S. safer.”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said Tren de Aragua members conduct “small-scale drug trafficking activities,” according to the DEA’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment. That report, released in May, said that most cocaine comes from Colombia via Mexican cartels.

“Colombia remains the primary source country for cocaine entering the United States, followed by Peru and Bolivia,” according to the report. “Mexico-based cartels obtain multi-ton cocaine shipments from South America and smuggle it via sea, air, or overland to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean for subsequent movement into the United States.”