Who Pays for the War Machine
Congress is now left to sort through the wreckage of President Donald Trump’s nearly four-month conflict with Iran: lives lost, billions spent, and a national security fallout that has reordered political dynamics in the Middle East. The war was never authorized by Congress, and Congress never fully objected to it either, a neat little demonstration of how power can move ahead while elected bodies posture after the fact.
Asked what they think about the deal Trump struck to end the war, senators offered sharply different views. Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called it “Pathetic. Failure. Inevitable conclusion of a combination of never making the case to the American people, flawed strategic vision, lack of grasp of the regional dynamics.” He added, “How many ways, can I say, bad, bad, bad?”
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a past chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, defended the outcome, saying, “We are safer today.” He added, “You can criticize — Oh, he didn’t totally win. Well, that was always going to be very difficult.”
The People at the Bottom Foot the Bill
As Trump moves on, Congress is left to explain the war to voters back home, restock a military arsenal that has run low from bombing runs, and try to ensure the fragile ceasefire holds as the United States seeks to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions and work toward an uneasy peace. That means more money, more reports, more bureaucratic choreography around a conflict that already burned through public resources.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the rounds on Capitol Hill this past week as lawmakers considered Defense Department funding as part of the Republican majority’s next big budget package. The White House has asked for $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon this year, on top of the extra money Republicans delivered as part of Trump’s tax cuts package last year. Republicans are considering a $350 billion plus-up for Hegseth on par with the White House’s budget request, and they could pass it on their own through the reconciliation process that allows majority rule over potential objections from Democrats.
Senators are seeking to set guardrails on Hegseth with a provision to block a portion of his travel fund until the Pentagon delivers various reports. One such report concerns the strike on an elementary school in Iran that killed more than 165 people, a flashpoint at the start of the war. Officials have said they believe the U.S. was responsible for the strike and that it was based on faulty intelligence.
What They Call Oversight
Lawmakers are still processing what happened after Trump swiftly signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran and opened a window of 60-day talks toward ending Tehran’s nuclear program. Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who serves on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said, “I understand the president’s trying to find a peaceful solution to this. I commend him for that. But we’ve got a lot of questions.”
Those questions include the tentative deal’s provision for a potential $300 billion fund for the “reconstruction and economic development” of Iran. To many skeptical Republicans, that money sounds similar to the planeloads-of-cash narrative they used against the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, which offered a slim fraction of that amount, some $1.7 billion overall. Trump still tells an exaggerated story of how that payment to Iran, for U.S. military equipment it never received, was made.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said, “The only concerns I have are the money and the conditions.” He added, “If we send a trainload, a shipload, it’s gonna age as well as that.”
Congress tried and failed to exert its authority under the war powers act to halt the U.S. military action in Iran. The House ultimately passed a war powers resolution that sought to force an end to the war after a small number of Republicans joined the Democratic measure last month. The Senate has voted nine times, including this past week, but failed to reach the majority needed. At the same time, Congress did not affirmatively authorize the war with a use of force resolution, as has been done in certain other conflicts, including the Iraq War.
After the Ceasefire, the Accounting Begins
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement, “I’m glad that the conflict has finally ended and hope the ceasefire holds.” But she said the country must be clear-eyed about what has come about. Not one of the president’s objectives has been achieved, she said, and Iran won significant concessions. “The American people are paying the price with higher costs in every aspect of life and tens of billions in tax dollars spent,” she said.
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said it is hard to see what leverage the U.S. gained to force Iran to a better negotiation. “You want to be able to give the benefit of the doubt,” she said. But Murkowski added, “I think we’re in a place where there is a deal that has been signed, but it doesn’t appear to me that it puts us in that much of a different position than prior to the beginning of the war.”
The war may be winding down, but the machinery around it is not. Congress is still being asked to fund the Pentagon, manage the political fallout, and explain why a conflict it never authorized was allowed to run nearly four months, leaving behind dead civilians, depleted arsenals, and a bill that ordinary people will keep paying long after the speeches are over.