Lawmakers given classified briefings Tuesday evening on the U.S. military conflict in Iran expect President Donald Trump will ask Congress for emergency cash to finance the war.
During the closed-door meetings on Capitol Hill, top Trump administration officials said only that they are considering a supplemental military funding request, according to lawmakers who attended the briefings. But senior intelligence and defense officials described a vast military operation that many members anticipate will require extra funding on top of the nearly $1 trillion Congress has already given the military over the last year.
“I think there will be a supplemental coming,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters upon leaving his classified Senate briefing. “We’ll have to approve that.”
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Senate committee overseeing funding for the Department of Homeland Security, said after the briefing that the military operation “feels like a multitrillion-dollar, open-ended conflict with a very confusing and constantly shifting set of goals” because top Trump administration officials “are refusing to take off the table ground operations.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) also described the U.S.-Iran conflict as “a massive operation” that’s “rapidly changing.”
“It sounded very open-ended to me,” he added.
Some lawmakers typically opposed to increased spending are open to the idea of providing extra money to fuel the U.S. military’s operation against Iran. “I think it would have support of Republicans,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said about a supplemental funding request Tuesday night.
“Everybody always wants money, any excuse, whether they’ll need it or not. My guess: They’ll need it,” Johnson continued. “We’re shooting off a lot of ammo. Gotta restock.”
But Democratic votes will be needed to pass any emergency funding package in the Senate, and minority party leaders say they will need far more details from the Trump administration if they are going to consider support for new Pentagon cash.
“Before you can feel satisfied about a supplemental — and I haven’t seen it — you have to know what the real goals are and what the endgame is,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters Tuesday.
Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a senior Democratic appropriator, said he expects the Pentagon will send Congress a supplemental funding request and vowed to “make sure we are making all the investments we can” to keep U.S. troops safe.
But Coons said Trump administration officials need to testify at an open hearing so “the American people can get questions answered about the failures in planning that led to some of the challenges, losses and mistakes in this war.”
Any supplemental spending package to support the Iran war effort would come on top of the more than $150 billion the Pentagon got from the party-line tax and spending package Republicans enacted last summer and nearly $839 billion in regular funding Congress cleared last month.
The House’s lead Democratic appropriator, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, said lawmakers have yet to receive information about how much the Pentagon has spent already.
“They’re talking about a supplemental, but we haven’t got a clue,” DeLauro told reporters after Trump administration officials briefed House lawmakers later Tuesday. “There’s no cost estimate of what they have spent so far. Is there anybody writing down what the hell they’re spending? No.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday that Republicans “forward-funded” military operations with the party-line package enacted last summer but that lawmakers will be “paying attention” to any need for extra money.
“Not only do we have the resources to conduct the operations right now, but a lot of our allies in the region also have capabilities that are coming to bear now,” Thune said.
Even before the strikes on Iran, Trump was eyeing a massive hike in military spending for the upcoming fiscal year. He pledged to pursue a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, a roughly 50 percent increase to military spending.
The president said Tuesday, however, that U.S. military resources are far from depleted.
“We have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons,” Trump said on social media. “Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies.”
Jordain Carney, Meredith Lee Hill, Connor O’Brien, Joe Gould and Calen Razor contributed to this report.
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