The list of questions surrounding the war with Iran is not short, but for members of Congress, one of the more nagging lines of inquiry involves the price tag: What exactly is this war of choice costing American taxpayers?
Roughly a week after Donald Trump launched combat operations, congressional sources with knowledge of the matter said the war was costing the United States an estimated $1 billion a day. A week later, a congressional source told MS NOW the administration, during a private briefing for lawmakers, revised that number to $1.6 billion a day.
More than a month later, the questions persist, but the White House apparently doesn’t want to answer them. The New York Times reported:
The White House declined to estimate the cost of the war with Iran at a congressional hearing on Thursday, prompting some Senate Democrats to criticize the Trump administration for its lack of transparency.
In a second appearance on Capitol Hill this week, Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, sidestepped questions about the price tag of the U.S.- and Israel-led conflict.
At one point, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, suggested Vought, instead of giving lawmakers a precise dollar amount, could share with the committee a general range of the cost. He refused.
At the same hearing, Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon asked whether the administration has spent $50 billion on the conflict, as some media reports have indicated. Vought, who was in a position to know the answer, said he didn’t want to “make a characterization.”
Merkley later told The Hill that Vought was trying to “hide” the cost of the war for political reasons, adding, “He doesn’t want a number to be out there because it’s a big number and it’s very disturbing to Americans.”
Murray also made her dissatisfaction clear.
“You’re just not going to tell us, because you don’t want us to know how much is being spent,” she told the White House budget director during the proceedings. “We have a responsibility here; Senator Merkley mentioned that. We have to know how much is spent so we can put our budgets together, so we can make our annual appropriations. And I just find it outrageous that as director, you’re not willing to tell us what those costs are. It’s your job to know.”
To state the obvious, fair-minded observers would agree the most important cost in any war is the human cost, and this avoidable conflict has already taken a brutal toll.
But given the broader circumstances, and the role of political leaders in shaping the war’s future, it’s also important to acknowledge the fact that this is an election year, and many congressional Democrats have already seized on the growing financial costs of the unpopular war.
These questions, in other words, are going to keep getting louder, and Vought’s reluctance to disclose the details is likely to prove unsustainable. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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