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Is the Mueller probe costing $20 million, as Donald Trump says?
President Donald Trump has criticized the special counsel investigation headed by Robert Mueller on a variety of grounds. In a recent tweet, he took it to task for its price tag.
On May 20, he tweeted: "At what point does this soon to be $20,000,000 Witch Hunt, composed of 13 Angry and Heavily Conflicted Democrats and two people who have worked for Obama for 8 years, STOP! They have found no Collussion with Russia, No Obstruction, but they aren’t looking at the corruption..."
Trump’s tweet caught our eye, because it doubled his estimate of the Mueller probe’s cost from $10 million just five days earlier. Trump echoed a comment by one of his lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, that pegged the figure at $20 million.
Is the Mueller probe really approaching $20 million? It does if you use the most aggressive accounting method. (The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this article.)
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The Mueller investigation is being funded through mandatory spending, which essentially means it is set up to be free of executive branch influence. However, Justice Department officials do have a degree of oversight to make sure that money isn’t wasted, as with any other department office.
Mueller’s office has released one accounting of its expenses so far. The report was released in December 2017, and it covered the first four and a half months of the probe, from May 17-Sept. 30, 2017.
According to the report, the Mueller investigation spent $3.2 million directly during that period. The biggest category was $1.7 million for staff salaries and benefits, while the second-largest was for equipment. Smaller categories included travel, rent, utilities and supplies.
If you prorate that amount out to a full year—the approximate length of the investigation at the time Trump sent his tweet — it would come to about $8.5 million spent so far. That’s well below the $20 million Trump cited.
As it happens, Congress and the White House projects that the Mueller investigation will be racking up costs at an even faster clip than what has been reported so far.
The special counsel’s office is officially budgeted for $10.4 million in direct costs for fiscal year 2018 (running from Oct. 1, 2017, to Sept. 30, 2018), and the Trump administration has earmarked another $10.4 million in its budget request for fiscal year 2019 (running from Oct. 1, 2018 to Sept. 30, 2019).
If the investigation ends up spending at this pace, it’s possible that it could eventually surpass $20 million in direct costs. That would be speculative, however, because that would occur months in the future, and because we don’t know whether the investigation will keep spending money at the same rate.
Using a different accounting method, however, the $20 million projected cost isn’t implausible.
A footnote in the report says that the investigation has also incurred $3.5 million in indirect costs, a category it says is "neither legally required" for disclosure nor reported in filings by previous special counsels.
Mueller’s office argues that these indirect expenses don’t amount to additional taxpayer expenditures, since these resources — especially personnel, such as employees of the FBI or other agencies — would have been devoted to other cases if there had been no special counsel investigation.
However, if you do count the indirect expenses, the total comes to $6.7 million spent during those first four and a half months. Prorated to cover the investigation’s full first year, the total of direct and indirect expenses reaches $17.9 million. That's not too far off from $20 million.
Here’s a summary of what’s been spent by, authorized for, and requested for the Mueller investigation so far:
Fiscal year
Start date
End Date
Direct spending
Indirect spending
Total spent
Authorized (direct only)
Requested (direct only)
2017
May 17, 2017
Sept. 30, 2017
$3.2 million
$3.5 million
$6.7 million
$3.9 million
--
2018
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Oct. 1, 2017
Sept. 30, 2018
Not yet reported
Not yet reported
Not yet reported
$10.4 million
--
2019
Oct. 1, 2018
Sept. 30, 2019
--
--
--
--
$10.4 million
The investigation of President Bill Clinton over Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky — headed by Kenneth Starr and then by his successor, Robert Ray — cost upward of $52 million over half a decade. Another $40 million-plus went toward a handful of other Clinton-era independent counsel investigations.
Meanwhile, the investigation of Reagan administration officials over the Iran-Contra Affair, headed by Lawrence Walsh, topped out at more than $47 million over a roughly similar period.
Those figures are direct costs only, and are not adjusted for inflation. Their price tags would be far higher when converted to 2018 dollars.
Trump tweeted that the Mueller investigation will soon be $20 million.
Officially, it’s not costing that much. Counting direct costs only, as Justice Department and executive branch accounting rules specify, the investigation’s first year cost an estimated $8.5 million, assuming Mueller’s team continued to spend at the same rate it did for the first four and a half months. (It could be months before we have updated figures.)
However, with the addition of indirect costs, the first year would be expected to cost a prorated $17.9 million, which is within shouting distance of the $20 million Trump cited.
We rate the statement Half True.
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Our Sources
Donald Trump, tweet, May 20, 2018
Justice Department, "Special Counsel’s Office Statement of Expenditures, May 17, 2017 to September 30, 2017," December 2017
Justice Department, budget for fiscal year 2019, Feb. 15, 2018
Justice Department, "Summary of Budget Authority by Appropriation," accessed May 22, 2018
Justice Department, "Authorization of Appropriations," accessed May 22, 2018
Washington Post, "Mueller investigation cost $6.7 million within first five months," Dec. 5, 2017
Washington Post, "$52 Million Starr Probe Costliest Ever," April 1, 2000
Washington Post, "Cost of Special Probes Detailed," April 1, 1999
Business Insider, "Mueller's investigation into Trump started one year ago — here's how long special prosecutor investigations usually last," May 17, 2018
Politico, "Trump budget anticipates Mueller investigation will stretch into fiscal year 2019," Feb. 12, 2018
Email interview with Peter Carr, spokesman for the special counsel’s office, May 22, 2018
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More by Louis Jacobson
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