LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
July 23, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
Jul 24, 2026
I have been thinking lately about taxes and war and citizens and what the government should do for its people. In early March 1953, soon after Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower took office, Soviet leader Josef Stalin died, giving the president a chance to reset the rising militarization of the United States. In mid-April, in a speech to newspaper editors that he insisted on delivering although he was suffering acutely from inflammatory bowel disease, Eisenhower warned of diverting the nation’s tax dollars to war at the expense of the people.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.
“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Eisenhower’s speech has been on my mind as the Trump administration slashes Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, foreign aid, scientific and medical research, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and yet is demanding more money for the Defense Department, bled out by Trump’s foreign adventures in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, the Caribbean, Venezuela, and, of course, Iran.
Because Trump’s war on Iran has run through the already-expanded budget Congress provided, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was on Capital Hill Tuesday asking Congress for an additional $67 billion to get the Defense Department through the end of September. But Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) picked up on the possibility that the administration was trying to use the supplemental funding request as a backdoor way to get around the constitutional and legal requirement for Congress to approve military action in Iran.
Emine Yücel explained in Talking Points Memo that Murkowski referred to the 1999 opinion of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President Bill Clinton that “the supplemental appropriation itself—passed without any authorizing language—satisfied the War Powers Resolution requirement.” Murkowski asked if Trump was intending to invoke the same reasoning, claiming that congressional funding for the war would, by itself, “substitute for explicit congressional authorization.”
Hegseth said he would “defer to our legal department” on that issue.
If you’re having trouble figuring out the funding for the Iran War and funding for the military in general, you’re in good company. The administration has obfuscated that funding so thoroughly, as Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), who is the top ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee and a member of its defense subcommittee, told Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo, that the administration hasn’t even told Congress where the money is going.
“We had Hegseth in front of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and he couldn’t give us an accounting and wouldn’t give us an accounting. They still haven’t given us an accounting,” Morelle told Walker. “It’s unfathomable.”
Morelle explained to Walker that the administration is turning to three separate buckets for war funding: standard congressional appropriations; budget reconciliation measures that don’t have to go through appropriations committees , can’t be filibustered ,and so can pass with simple majorities; and supplemental requests. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” Morelle said.
“The whole thing is alarming because, look…there’s finite resources. And the United States government needs to make decisions about where we’re gonna place our priorities, where we’re gonna invest our money,” Morelle explained. “If everything were just defense, we could argue about that number and that number alone, but every time you make a decision about increasing defense and security spending by $600 billion, which is a 60% increase virtually over last year, it means something else isn’t getting funded or alternatively, you’re borrowing more money.”
While Hegseth told Congress the war has cost $37.5 billion so far, Gordon Lubold, Mosheh Gains, and Courtney Kube of NBC News reported on July 14 that the internal Pentagon estimate of the cost is about $100 billion. Walker notes that when economists at Moody’s added higher gas prices to the cost of the war, they estimated that it has cost U.S. households about $1,100 each.
Yesterday Steve Rattner of MS NOW reported that “[u]nder Trump, the debt held by the federal government has surpassed 100% of GDP. By 2030, it’ll shoot past its all-time record from WWII.” Also yesterday, Megan Messerly of Politico reported that just over a third of MAGA voters think the Iran war has been worth the economic cost, down from about half of them in May.
A person close to the White House told Messerly that White House officials are “at a maximum level of frustration right now, and I was told by very senior people that the president is now fully aware that the only way to the victory that he wants is completely politically impossible. The American people just will not support the kind of escalation it would take at this point. We’ve got more dead Americans and a politically impossible situation.”
Although attacking civilian infrastructure for political purposes is a war crime, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio appear to be threatening it. “From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran,” Trump posted on social media yesterday morning.
Today Rubio said Iranian policy is “an eye for an eye” and added: “The president’s policy is a head for an eye. I mean, honestly, that’s what it’s going to be. I mean, they will pay a very heavy price for the things they do.”
The price of oil surged by 7% to more than $100 a barrel for Brent crude today after Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed to have attacked two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Red Sea. This raises concerns about the potential closure of the Bab el-Mandeb strait between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, through which about 12% to 15% of the world’s maritime trade passes every year.
The average price of gasoline in the United States rose to $4.09 a gallon today.
After twelve days of escalating strikes between the U.S. and Iran, the strikes against ships in the Red Sea are a new development in the war. This morning, Trump warned on social media that the U.S. would consider the Houthis’ “interference with commerce and trade, by shooting at ships,” as the responsibility of Iran. In response, he said, “major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran.”
Yesterday Shelby Holliday, Lara Seligman, and Stephen Kalin of the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. has been surging troops, weaponry, and medics to the Middle East. These new forces add to the tens of thousands of troops already there. The U.S. Navy also has 17 ships in the region, including two aircraft-carrier strike groups, with eleven destroyers and a Marine Corps expeditionary unit. Retired general Joseph Votel, former commander of Central Command and of U.S. Special Operations Command, told the reporters the surge doesn’t necessarily mean the launch of new operations. They are designed to give the president and the Secretary of Defense options.
Barak Ravid of Axios, who often has inside information from the White House, reported today that Trump is “close to making a decision” about a “massive attack” on Iran. Ravid reported that Trump says the Iranians “want to negotiate” but “haven’t received enough pain yet.”
Today the House of Representatives passed a concurrent resolution to end the war in Iran by a vote of 214 to 208. Four Republicans—Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, and Tom Barrett of Michigan—joined the Democrats.
A concurrent resolution expresses the sentiments of Congress. It is not a law and does not require a signature from the president.
Concurrent resolutions are often used for congressional business like setting the time of adjournment. House members have turned to them to oppose the Iran War because concurrent resolutions are “privileged” in the House, which means they can bypass standard scheduling requirements.
Representative Jason Crow (D-CO), a former paratrooper and Army Ranger who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and House Armed Services Committee, told his colleagues that while Iran poses a threat to the U.S., so do North Korea and Russia, and there has been no move automatically to go to war with them.
The impulse to resort to war as the only answer to threats led to “twenty-plus years”of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, “trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives lost for wars that ended poorly,” Crow said. “Americans are done with an endless cycle of conflict in the Middle East. When I was in Afghanistan, our adversaries, the enemies that we fought, would often say, ‘Americans have all the clocks, but we have all the time.’ They simply want to wait us out, knowing that we’ll just spend more money, have more combat deployments, and will just continue to do it, year after year, until we wear out.”
Crow said he could not answer his “constituents who are losing homes, losing their farms, losing their health care, who can’t answer the simple question: How is this making me safer? How is this improving my life?”
Later in the day, the Senate took up a measure backed by Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) to force the president to end the U.S. hostilities with Iran. That measure was different from the concurrent resolution in the House. It was a “joint resolution,” which is a law and which does go to the president for a signature. A joint resolution is usually used for something urgent and straightforward, like a declaration of war.
Senators have turned to joint resolutions to oppose the Iran War because joint resolutions are privileged in the Senate, although generally not in the House.
The Senate declined to advance Van Hollen’s S.J. Res. 180 [or Senate Joint Resolution 180] by a vote of 47 to 49. Four Republican senators did not vote.
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
