WASHINGTON - It costs $2,315 a second to run Operation Epic Fury. By the time you finish this sentence, another few thousand dollars is gone, incinerated somewhere over Iranian airspace, 7,000 targets deep into a war that no American voted for, no Congress authorized, and no one in power can fully explain.
That’s not rhetorical. That’s arithmetic.
The budget realities are even starker this week. The Pentagon asked the White House yesterday to approve a supplemental request of more than $200 billion to keep the war in Iran running. Pete Hegseth confirmed it at a press briefing this morning, adding four words that will outlast his tenure: “It takes money to kill bad guys.” He also said, and mark this carefully, that the $200 billion figure “could move.” Could move. In one direction. Everyone in that briefing room understood what that meant.
This is on top of the $12 billion already spent since February 28. On top of the $150 billion the Defense Department received in last year’s tax cuts bill. On top of a base Pentagon budget of $856 billion for fiscal year 2026. The national debt cleared $39 trillion this week. That number is no longer abstract. It is a policy choice made by people who also decided last year that Medicaid was too expensive.
The Constitution is not ambiguous on this. Article I, Section 8: Congress declares war. Not the president. Not the Secretary of War, which is what Pete Hegseth insists on calling himself, as though the branding alone settles the legal question. Congress. The power is unambiguous, the framers were explicit, and James Madison wrote it down in plain English: the “temptation” to commit a nation to war would be too great for any one man.
Trump launched the strikes on February 28 without a declaration of war. Without congressional authorization. The Senate voted 53 to 47 to reject a bipartisan War Powers Resolution that would have required him to end the war. The House voted 219 to 212 to block even debating the question. Republican leadership called the constitutional challenge “a frightening prospect.” Mike Johnson said the U.S. “was not at war.” They were voting, in real time, to surrender the legislature’s most fundamental power, and they did it on a party-line vote, seven days into a conflict which had already killed six American service members.
Sen. Ed Markey called it plainly: “Trump’s military attack on Iran is illegal and unconstitutional. It was not approved by Congress and holds dangers for all Americans.”
This constitutional warning echoes across institutions. The ACLU said the same. The Brennan Center said the same. Constitutional scholars across the political spectrum said the same. The administration’s response was to rename the Pentagon and keep bombing.
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Now consider the math in concrete terms. The $12 billion already spent on this war could have provided a full year of Medicaid coverage to 1.3 million Americans, a population comparable to that of Dallas. It could have paid 166,000 teacher salaries, covering the entire teaching workforce in Florida. Alternatively, it could have extended ACA subsidies at the level set before their expiration last year, and still left $18 billion unspent. These are side-by-side budget choices, not theoretical ones.
The CBO director confirmed to Senator Elizabeth Warren that extending ACA credits for one year would cost $30 billion. The Iran war, at its advertised pace, burns through that in a month.
A single Tomahawk missile costs $2.2 million. That missile could instead have covered 775 children on Medicaid for a year, or provided school lunches to more than 3,600 children. These are not rhetorical comparisons. They are budget comparisons. The money is finite. The choices are deliberate.
Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee wrote it in a formal letter: the Trump administration has spent nearly $12 billion on “an open-ended war of choice in the Middle East” while allocating “zero dollars to lower your healthcare costs.” Senate Minority Leader Schumer said it from the floor: “We could fix a lot of health care with that $11 billion.”
Newsweek ran the headline this morning: Trump’s Iran War Budget Proposal is Bigger Than Public Education Spending. To clarify, it is not just larger than a single state’s education budget; it also exceeds the total annual U.S. public education budget.
The same Congress that voted to slash food stamps, Medicaid, and public housing, to fund more tax breaks for billionaires, found $200 billion more for bombs. There is no fiscal conservatism here. There is only a hierarchy of priorities, and American children are not at the top.
A.D. Bevan
In the days before February 28, the news cycle was dominated by the Epstein files. The Department of Justice had released more than 3 million pages of material, including FBI interview transcripts and documents that some interpreted as alleging sexual misconduct involving the president himself. Google searches for “Epstein files” were at historic highs. Congressional pressure was mounting. Attorney General Pam Bondi had promised a “client list” sitting on her desk, “right now to review.” The administration had made a show of handing out binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to pro-Trump influencers.
Then, as the strikes began, the searches plummeted.
That timing is not lost on anyone. Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a former Israeli diplomat and analyst at Atlas Global Strategies, told Al Jazeera the attack “and its timing are all about domestic politics” and that Trump “really needs a distraction from that in the form of a war.” He added, “And if you look at searches on Google for the Epstein files, they’ve plummeted since this started. So, at least temporarily, it’s succeeding.”
A Newsweek poll from March 6-8, 1,272 likely voters, found 52 percent believe Trump was “at least partly motivated to take military action against Iran in order to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.” Among voters under 45, it was a majority. Among Democrats and independents, 81 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Even 26 percent of Republicans said the same.
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican and co-author of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, posted on the day the strikes began: “PSA: Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away.” Sen. Jeff Merkley told KGW it was “one of the maybe contributing reasons that Trump was tempted to go to war without getting an authorization.” Rep. Ro Khanna, who was in the room when Democrats walked out of the Bondi briefing this week, said Bondi will have to answer “why there are still 3 million documents being hidden” and “why there was a cover-up of those files that implicated Donald Trump.”
This week, Bondi was subpoenaed and, in a closed briefing, repeatedly declined to confirm she would comply. Democrats walked out. The files are still not fully released. The war is still burning $200 million a day.
The White House called the Epstein distraction theory “ridiculous.” In their response, the administration pointed to the timeline of military and budget decisions while a congressional investigation continued into a child sex trafficking network that includes people in their orbit.
They want you to focus on Iran. That is the point.
Here is what Hegseth actually said today, in full: “It takes money to kill bad guys.” Not: it takes money to protect American interests. Not: it takes money to fulfill a congressional mandate, or honor a treaty, or respond to an attack on American soil. It takes money to kill bad guys. That is the entire argument. That is the justification for $200 billion, a number larger than the annual defense budgets of every country on Earth except the United States, extracted from the same treasury that cannot find money for insulin, housing, school lunches, or children’s health insurance.
No American asked for or authorized this war. Seven service members are dead, 140 wounded. Thousands of Iranian civilians, including 168 children, have been killed in a school strike under UN investigation. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, oil prices are spiking, and the national debt just crossed $39 trillion. The Pentagon wants $200 billion more. The number could move.
It always does.
Nadia Qureshi
