Costs of War

Professor Linda J. Bilmes is a leading expert on budgeting and public finance. She is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Public Finance at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she teaches courses on budgeting and financial management and teaches in the Newly-elected Members of Congress and Newly-Elected Mayors programs. She is Faculty Chair of the Greater Boston Applied Field Lab and the Bloomberg Cities Field Lab, an experiential learning program in which students work directly on complex challenges in cities across the country. She also teaches at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.

Dr. Bilmes served as Assistant Secretary for Management and Budget and Chief Financial Officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce from 1998 to 2001 and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce from 1997-1998. She has served on numerous government boards and commissions, including the National Parks Second Century Commission, the U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service Advisory Board, the US Department of Labor Veterans Employment and Opportunity Board, and a US Department of Treasury Commission on the InterAmerican Investment Corporation. She is co-chair of Economists for Peace and Security and serves as the U.S. member on the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration. She also serves on the advisory board of the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University.

She has authored numerous books, book chapters and papers including the New York Times bestseller The Three Trillion Dollar War (with Joseph E. Stiglitz), The People Factor (with W. Scott Gould), and Valuing the US National Parks and Programs: America’s Best Investment (with John Loomis). Her forthcoming book The Ghost Budget: Paying for America’s Wars will be published in 2026. Her research focuses on how budgetary resources are allocated, particularly with respect to the value of public lands, state and local governments, costs of war, veterans, and the military. She has received many awards and honors, including the 2008 “Speaking Truth to Power” Award by the American Friends Service Committee. Her research has been published in The New York Times, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Boston Globe, Barron’s and Foreign Policy and numerous academic journals. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. She holds an AB and MBA from Harvard University and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.