The Texas War Department said it would need another $460 million this year to keep the border mission afloat.

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The head of the Texas War Department told Senate budget planners on Thursday that it would cost $459.3 million to keep thousands of active duty troops in Gov. Greg Abbott’s highly publicized border security mission through the end of August. troops on a mission.

Maj. Gen. Thomas Sulzer, who heads the agency, announced the latest funding gap for the current fiscal year and also asked the Senate Finance Committee, which makes the state budget, to provide $1.8 billion to keep the Texas National Guard on the frontier. missions during the next two-year budget cycle, which begins in September.

Dubbed “Operation Lone Star”, the mission is the largest deployment of members of the Texas National Guard to the frontier in terms of size and duration. It started in March 2021 and Abbott once boasted that he had 10,000 troops deployed.

The mission proved to be costly. In September 2021, the Texas Legislature approved nearly $2 billion to beef up a border operation to limit the number of migrants crossing the border from Mexico. But the Texas military department quickly used up its share of the funding after Abbott increased the number of troops in the mission. As a result, the Governor repeatedly had to transfer money from other agencies to delay the mission until the end of the current budget cycle. Abbott said these agencies will be reimbursed in the next biennium.

Last year, senior government officials at the behest of Abbott transferred more than $1.3 billion to the military to continue its border operations. On Thursday, Sulzer said the Abbott office had given the agency another $287.3 million to continue border operations from January through March.

Sulzer, who heads the agency, told the Senate Finance Committee that the newly requested $459.3 million is expected to flow through the Abbott office again.

At current troop levels, the mission has been costing the military department between $92 million and $101 million a month since January, Sulzer said. He added that the department would no longer need general revenues from budget preparers before the start of the new fiscal year.

Sulzer also told lawmakers that the mission now has a troop strength of 4,576, down from September when military officials said they still had more than 5,000 troops.

With technological upgrades, such as the use of surveillance drones, the number of deployed troops is expected to continue to decline, as does the cost of a mission, Sulzer said.

Those troops now include 600 troops and 100 trucks in El Paso, where the number of migrants trying to cross the border increased significantly in December.