Law Sgt. Brian O'Rourke and Cpl. Drennon, both members of the Berkeley County Police Department special response team, acquit a counterterrorism operation to clear potential simulated threats at the commissary on Naval Weapons Station Charleston, S.C., Sept. 28, 2009. U.South. Department of Defense

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The United states has spent a lot of money on counterterrorism since the 9/11 attacks. But nobody has been keeping good runway of just how much, until now.

A bipartisan group of national security and upkeep experts convened by the Stimson Heart estimated in a new report on May xvi that the cumulative tally is at to the lowest degree $2.8 trillion, and that the annual spending rate — while less than it used to be — nevertheless amounts to about 15 percent of the nation's discretionary budget.

The pace has slowed since 2008, when counterterrorism expenditures by the Country, Defence, Homeland Security and other federal departments reached an estimated $260 billion — or 277 percent more than the rate in 2002, the report said. In 2017, that annual spending rate stood around $175 billion.

Only there'southward even so a lot of doubt surrounding these tallies, partly because no ane in the government is assigned to produce an official business relationship of all that spending. And information technology's clear that what can be gleaned from public documents about U.S. counterterrorism activities doesn't include classified spending, and also that some armed services, intelligence and domestic security spending lies in a grayness zone with multiple purposes.

Luke Hartig, 1 of the written report's authors and a former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council under the Obama Administration, suggested at a panel discussion at the Stimson Center that the absence of transparency was partly deliberate.

"Transparency would force harder questions about appropriations" from Congress, Hartig said. While the relatively low number of attacks and casualties does not equate to a tiny threat, Hartig said, "it still merits the question of whether $two.8 trillion is the optimal amount of resources it takes to mitigate that threat."

The authors of the written report raised this effect in the text, noting that since 9/11, only 100 people have been killed past Muslim extremists or jihadists within the United States, while more than 20,000 fentanyl-related (opioid) deaths occurred in 2016 alone.

"Some analysts conclude that spending $ii.8 trillion to counter a terrorism threat that has resulted in insufficiently few fatalities is a waste of increasingly scarce authorities resource that are ameliorate spent elsewhere," the report said. "Others may contend that terrorism's impact is more than psychological than physical, or that the low fatality count from terrorism and the lack of another 9/11-scale attack" suggest the money has been well spent.

"While the Stimson report group does not accept a opinion in this debate, it does conclude that arguing either case successfully — that is, determining whether CT [counterterrorism] expenditures have generated plenty do good to justify their toll — is difficult without accurate data nearly CT spending," it added.

The grouping recommended that the White House budget office be tasked with developing a comprehensive counterterrorism spending tally, using clear terms and definitions to delineate what qualifies and what does not. "Taking these actions will assistance to ensure that CT spending is targeted toward programs that are most effective in confronting the terrorist threat," they said.

Too Hartig, the other members of the group were Amy Belasco, a old defense policy specialist at the Congressional Budget Function; Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense specialist at the American Enterprise Institute; Tina Jonas, a old Defence force Section comptroller; Mike McCord, another former Defense Department comptroller; and John Mueller, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

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