Congress Can Control Trump’s Iran War
And it has a better tool than the War Powers Act.
CONGRESS IS SCRAMBLING to insert itself into the debate over next steps in Iran. The Senate on Wednesday weighed opening up a debate about whether the conflict fits within the scope of the War Powers Act—a Vietnam-vintage law riddled with loopholes that would be unlikely to constrain this White House anyway. The House is likely to vote on similar measures. Although Congress was not included in the leadup to this conflict, many members in both chambers simply do not want to authorize this war for fear of “owning” it if things go wrong.
But there is a far more direct way for Congress to intervene and to show constituents it remains focused on the kitchen-table issues that decide elections: the power of the purse.
Few in Washington are asking the most obvious question: What has this conflict already cost, and what will it ultimately cost the American taxpayer? Between the cost of deploying carrier strike groups and more than a hundred aircraft to the region, and the expenditure of hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles at roughly $2 million apiece, the price tag is reportedly about $1 billion per day. Reuters reported this week that the Pentagon is working on a supplemental budget request of around $50 billion focused on replacing weapons stocks. Congress should be preparing now to meet that moment, demanding a full accounting of costs and requiring the administration to define the mission’s objectives and a plan to achieve them.
I know this dynamic from the inside. I served in Congress as ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee during the Iraq and Afghanistan debates. As a member of the “Gang of Eight”—the small group of congressional leaders who receive the most sensitive national security briefings—I was fully briefed before and after the invasion of Iraq. Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were authorized by Congress, though the intelligence on Iraq turned out to be deeply flawed. Congress passed emergency supplemental after emergency supplemental, year after year, until finally requiring those war costs to be incorporated into the base defense budget rather than buried in off-budget accounts. According to Brown University’s nonpartisan Costs of War project, the final bill for Iraq exceeded $2 trillion. Afghanistan cost another $2.3 trillion.
Congress needs to confront Iran’s costs now, keeping in mind that Iran is only the most immediate item on a much larger bill. In January, President Trump called for a 50 percent increase in the annual defense budget—from roughly $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion—the largest proposed single-year jump since the Korean War. Congress should not wave these numbers through. Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to raise and support armies and to appropriate military funds.
Meanwhile, the president is claiming there is a “virtually unlimited supply” of U.S. munitions and that wars can be fought “forever.” But he is simultaneously summoning the CEOs of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to the White House to discuss emergency production increases. I have seen this kind of gap between public reassurance and private alarm before. It does not end well.
The munitions problem is not new. Since Russia invaded Ukraine and Israel began operations in Gaza, the United States has drawn down billions of dollars’ worth of weapons stockpiles. The Iran operation is now eating away at an arsenal that was already depleted. In 2024, the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy, which I chaired, warned that U.S. industrial production is “grossly inadequate” to provide the munitions needed today—let alone in a great power conflict. Every long-range missile fired at Iran is one fewer available for a crisis in Asia. The Pentagon’s plan is to eventually ramp up Tomahawk production to 1,000 per year. It currently buys 57.
A conflict that widens into a regional war, costs trillions, and adds to a national debt already at 122 percent of GDP is not a foreign policy abstraction. It will show up in inflation, in interest rates, in the cost of groceries and mortgages—in every congressional district in America. Several Republican senators have already drawn their own line: a ground war, they say, would require explicit congressional authorization. The administration has refused to rule it out. That is precisely why Congress should be engaged now, through the one tool it has always had: control of the money.
The War Powers Resolution is a statement. The power of the purse is the real weapon. Congress should start using it.
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