Congress has never passed a dedicated appropriation for the Iran war. Seven months in, that sentence is still true, and it is the most important fact about how the war is being financed.
The Pentagon’s own inspector general put direct costs at $33.4 billion through June 30. The Congressional Budget Office, using a broader method, put it at $38.1 billion through August 1, and found the war is now running $2 billion to $3 billion a month with no end in sight. Separately, U.S. Central Command told Congress this month the figure is $45.1 billion, depending on what gets counted. The numbers move because no one has agreed on what belongs in them. What has not moved is the appropriation. There isn’t one.
In June, the White House sent Capitol Hill an $87.6 billion supplemental request, $67.1 billion of it for the Pentagon. CBO reviewed that request line by line and concluded only $42.3 billion of it was actually tied to the war; the rest was readiness and modernization spending the Pentagon wanted anyway, riding on a war’s urgency to skip the normal budget queue. Congress has not passed it. The House advanced a reconciliation blueprint in July that could unlock new dollars later, but reconciliation is not an appropriation, and the Senate has not scheduled floor action. Majority Leader John Thune said in July he wanted to prioritize a government funding deal before touching the supplemental. That deal has come and gone. The supplemental has not moved with it.
So where is the money coming from? The services are paying for an active war out of their base budgets, the accounts meant for training, maintenance, and the modernization programs Congress did appropriate for a different purpose. The Pentagon’s inspector general reported this produced “strategic inventory shortfalls” and exposed “industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.” When a reporter asked the War Department in writing what modernization is being deferred to cover the gap, a senior official did not answer the question. He disputed the inspector general’s conclusions instead.
This is not a story about whether the Iran war is justified. Reasonable people disagree, and Congress itself is split: Representative Pat Ryan’s No Funds for Iran War Act has been gaining co-sponsors in the House, and lawmakers have taken repeated floor votes attempting to end the conflict outright. Those votes are at least an argument about the war. What’s missing is any vote on how to pay for it. The authorization fight and the appropriation fight are being conducted as if they were the same fight, and they are not. You can support the mission and still object that nobody with the constitutional authority to write a check has written one.
Article I gives the power of the purse to Congress for exactly this reason: so that a war’s bills come due in public, on the record, with members of Congress on record for how they voted. What has happened instead is a workaround. The executive branch spends through base accounts that were appropriated for something else, Congress holds hearings and takes messaging votes, and the supplemental request that would actually settle the question sits untouched. Cost estimates have climbed in every hearing since April, from $25 billion to $29 billion to $37.5 billion to today’s $45.1 billion, and each new number arrives the same way: as testimony, not as a line item anyone approved in advance.
There is a version of this where Congress passes the supplemental, trims the padding CBO flagged, and puts its name on the actual war costs. There is another version where Congress passes the No Funds Act or something like it and forces a real stop. Either one is Congress doing its job. What’s happening now is neither. It’s a war being paid for on the Pentagon’s discretion and Congress’s silence, and the bill is already larger than the number anyone voted on.
Jose Navarro is a financial controller with more than 20 years of experience in public and nonprofit finance, and the publisher of The Navarro Report.