The quagmire President Donald Trump started in Iran is growing as the nation chokes off a critical oil transport route and continues retaliatory strikes on oil and gas facilities in the Middle East—the consequences of which are spiking fuel prices across the globe.
With no off-ramp in sight, Trump's Pentagon is now seeking over $200 billion—yes, with a B—to fund the conflict, according to The Washington Post.
Asked on Thursday about the request, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth didn’t deny the figure.
“As far as $200 billion, I think that number could move. Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys. So we're going back to Congress and our folks there to ensure that we're properly funded for what's been done, for what we may have to do in the future, ensure that our ammunition is everything's refilled, and not just refilled, but above and beyond,” Hegseth said at a news conference.
The shamelessness of the Trump administration to ask for $200 billion for war while it also argues that the United States cannot bear the expense of extending health care subsidies is stomach-churning.
The first six days of the war alone cost roughly $11.3 billion—about a third of what it would have cost to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies that Trump and the Republican Party let expire. To Republicans, a war that is exacerbating Americans’ cost-of-living crisis is more important than making health care more affordable. So much for “America First.”
Of course, there is no way Democrats would vote to support a $200 billion request to fund a war that Trump never sought congressional approval for, nor provided a coherent reasoning for why it was necessary in the first place. That means it's unlikely a supplemental funding bill for the conflict could pass through regular channels.
Republicans would instead have to rely on budget reconciliation—a congressional procedure that allows the Senate to advance legislation with a simple majority rather than the 60-vote filibuster threshold.
A thick plume of smoke rises from an Iranian oil storage facility hit by a U.S.-Israeli strike on March 8.
But budget reconciliation comes with strings attached, and it would likely mean that Republicans would need to find $200 billion in offsets to fund the war request. And such a hefty price tag would likely require painful cuts to social safety net programs, forcing Republicans to make an unpopular vote in an election year, all to fund an unpopular war.
You know what we call that? Political suicide.
Of course, at this point, the war is such a mess that talking about it in solely political terms feels wrong.
At least 13 American soldiers have died in the war so far, and more than 200 have been injured. Hundreds of civilians across the Middle East have also been killed in attacks related to the war. That includes the over 170, most of them children, whom the U.S. killed in an airstrike on an elementary school.
Meanwhile, gas prices are up 95 cents per gallon on average from a month ago, according to data from AAA. Patrick De Haan, an pricing expert with GasBuddy, said the speed of the gas price increase is setting records.
Not only is that a significant amount for millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck, but it could also have serious downstream effects on the economy if consumers have to cut back on other spending to afford gas.
This is a mess of Trump's making, and with each passing day, it's harder to see how we get out of it unscathed.
