Republicans keep saying Aaron Ford's policies will cost $18B. Here's why it's misleading.

$18 billion.

It's how much Gov. Joe Lombardo's (R) campaign claims would be the cost of implementing Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford's (D) policies — and it's becoming one of the more common attack lines in the race for governor.

Fox News wrote a story about it. A PAC tied to Lombardo's campaign has posted about it relentlessly on social media. The campaign launched an entire attack website focused on it. And Lombardo himself mentioned the number at a rally with President Donald Trump last week.

But a closer look at the underlying numbers shows that the $18 billion price tag is based almost entirely on assumptions that place seven-to-10 figure price tags on vague or rhetorical Ford policies and include costs that would actually save Nevadans money.

Most of the alleged new spending — more than $9.9 billion — is for costs borne by businesses or the federal government and thus not related to state revenues. And the proposal the report says is most expensive — canceling medical debt — was based on a significant misunderstanding of the process, a Stanford economist told The Indy.

Our analysis also found that the Lombardo campaign believes Ford's proposal to fight the Trump administration's tariffs — if successful — could save hundreds of millions of dollars for Nevada homebuyers. The governor's campaign has not previously admitted this.

There's still little clarity on the actual cost of Ford's proposed policies, which include significant investments in education likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars — difficult to square with his pledge to not raise taxes. Ford's campaign has declined to release its own cost estimates but has emphasized that the $18 billion calculation is significantly off base.

"General Ford has been clear that to know exactly how much investment will go into each program will be determined by how much money is in the state coffers once he takes office," Ford campaign spokesperson Prerna Jagadeesh said.

Lombardo has yet to release a platform — and its potential cost — if elected to a second term. Asked whether one will be issued, Lombardo's campaign noted that more policy specifics will be released in the coming weeks.

Halee Dobbins, a spokesperson for Lombardo's campaign, said the report was created "to provide Nevadans with a transparent estimate of Ford's proposals' cost." 

At a rally for Trump last week, Lombardo himself cited the report as proof Nevadans will suffer "taxes to the tune of $14,000 for each and every one of you on an annual basis" — a figure repeated on a new campaign website.

But the report itself, and the campaign's framing of it, makes significant leaps in logic.

While the campaign implies that all of the alleged costs would directly translate into higher costs for households, many of the supposed incurred costs would be placed on the federal government, which can operate at a deficit, or on businesses that do not necessarily increase costs for households. The report also found that many of the proposals would benefit Nevada households.

In Fox News' July 22 story about the report, UNR economics professor Mark Pingle said the $18 billion price tag "is a reasonable assessment," comments the campaign has highlighted.

Pingle, who described himself as "more on the conservative side" in an interview with The Indy, said the Lombardo campaign approached him to weigh in on the report. He said he understood why people were taking issue with the $18 billion figure, but added that Ford's proposals would cost a lot of money.

"You can manufacture almost any number you want, and so I think it's fair to question the number," said Pingle, who conceded he did not look into Ford's policies and the calculations in "significant detail." 

"On the other hand, the reason that I would say I don't have a problem with the Lombardo campaign saying, 'this is going to cost a lot,' is it's relatively obvious for anybody looking at the list of things they want to do — this is not just keeping everything the same."

Assumptions

The report is based on what the Lombardo campaign thinks would count as fulfilling the proposals laid out on Ford's website. 

To get there required a lot of assumptions.

For example, one of the biggest costs to the state identified by the report was $621 million related to Ford's stated desire to "fight back against Trump's dangerous agenda [on Medicaid] and work with state agencies to identify opportunities to mitigate the impact for Nevadans who will lose coverage." 

The Lombardo report assumed this meant that Ford wanted to backfill federal Medicaid cuts by using state dollars, and then attached an amount based on the cost of backfilling a quarter, not all, of the reductions. 

But Ford has not proposed such a backfill on his website, and his campaign disputed to Fox News that he wants to use state dollars for this purpose. Asked to clarify Ford's position, his campaign said that he "plans on fighting for the restoration of Medicaid funding" without elaborating on how.

The report also claims that Ford's pledges to improve Nevada's status as a clean energy leader and create a financial district in Las Vegas will cost $140 million. However, some of these costs are based on the assumption that Ford will establish new teams at the Governor's Office of Economic Development dedicated to particular goals — an approach that is not explicitly stated in Ford's proposals.

Big-ticket items

According to Lombardo's team, Ford's most expensive proposal overall is his promise to erase medical debt owed by low-income Nevadans, an idea growing in popularity nationwide as healthcare grows more expensive. 

It's relatively cheap for states to forgive medical debt because debts are often significantly devalued by the time collectors work with state agencies and nonprofits to extinguish them. The report estimates that if the state spent $35 million to forgive medical debt, it could erase $3.5 billion in medical debts billed to Nevadans, but that doing so would cost businesses that same amount.

Multiple experts who spoke to The Indy said that the report inaccurately framed medical debt forgiveness. 

"The numbers don't add up. … The $3.5 billion is what hospitals and other providers billed families, not the amount they can expect to collect," said Neale Mahoney, a Stanford University economist and expert on medical debt. "Medical debt sells for pennies on the dollar precisely because most of it is never paid — the $3.5 billion was never real money."

The most expensive Ford policy for the state specifically, according to the report, is his pledge to bring Nevada's per-pupil education funding up to the national average. The state has long struggled with education funding, and despite overhauling its complex funding formula in 2021, the state's average per-pupil spending — roughly $14,000 in the 2026-2027 school year — is still nearly $4,000 less than the national average. 

Lombardo's report estimates that Ford's education funding promise — assuming it was part of an effort to achieve the goal in 10 years — would cost the state $1.9 billion in Ford's first term. But the state's Commission on School Funding found in 2024 that boosting per-pupil funding in such a way would cost significantly less — about $900 million over the first four years, for a total of $2.5 billion over a decade. 

Ford has not yet issued an outline of how he would afford his ambitious education goal. He has said on the campaign trail that the state can finance his proposals by attracting new, high-tax businesses to Nevada and rooting out "waste, fraud and abuse" in state budgets. 

Underscoring all this is the high bar to raise taxes as a new governor. Most of the work on the state budget is completed by the time a governor is inaugurated in January — the legislative session starts about a month later — and the twin pressures of a constitutionally mandated balanced budget and two-third requirement to raise taxes makes any kind of revenue increase a longshot, regardless of governor.

Ford previously told The Indy that he knows not every campaign promise can be achieved immediately and that he's open to moving "incrementally" on some issues. 

Same costs for Lombardo policies?

Some of the biggest price tags are for policies where Ford aligns with Lombardo.

Ford supports using federal land for affordable housing and pledges that as governor, he would seek to achieve this goal by coordinating with both federal and local officials. The Lombardo-issued report pegs the cost of that plan at $3 billion in lost federal revenues, an amount that makes up one-sixth of the report's $18 billion topline figure. 

But Lombardo has expressed similar priorities, both while running for governor and in office. He touted his efforts on this front as among his "major accomplishments" in 2025. 

But Lombardo has said he wants to focus federal land efforts on attainable housing, while Ford has focused on affordable housing. The report thus assumes Ford would push to buy federal land at a heavily discounted rate — through the Bureau of Land Management's agreement with Nevada to sell land for affordable housing at $100 per acre — though this approach is not explicitly stated in Ford's housing plan.

Lombardo and Ford also have largely similar public stances on data centers. Lombardo has said he would not support any economic development project that increases Nevadans' utility costs, while Ford thinks any data center must pay for its own energy use and electrical grid updates.

The report says Ford's idea would require data centers to spend $325 million on covering energy costs they would otherwise share with Nevada ratepayers — 2 percent of the alleged costs outlined in the report.

However, Lombardo's plan for data centers would require the companies to cover all costs, including those not related to energy. The $325 million would therefore be the minimum cost of Lombardo's approach.

A tariff admission?

Ford's housing plan criticizes Trump's tariffs for driving up the price of essential construction materials such as aluminum, lumber and steel and passing those price hikes onto Nevadans — a theory shared by housing groups and economists across the partisan spectrum.

The Lombardo campaign's report estimates that Nevada households will save $314 million across four years if Ford is successful in undoing federal tariffs on homebuilding materials.

The report states that the $314 million figure is based on "forgone federal tariff revenue" and the "Nevada homebuyer passthrough share," or, in other words, the effects the tariffs have on the costs for Nevadans to build and buy homes.

Asked whether the report is an acknowledgement that tariffs have had this effect on homebuyers, Lombardo's campaign did not provide a direct answer.