For Trump, Emergency Cash from Congress Means Approval for More War

Trump’s war on Iran is illegal. Congress did not authorize it; Administration officials are still struggling, two weeks later, to define why they launched this project and what they hope to achieve.

But there is a way for the Trump administration to get some sort of congressional approval — one that presidents have used as a backdoor green light to launch war. And, according to reports, it’s close to achieving just that. The administration should ask Congress to pass an emergency supplemental funding bill. Depending on which report you look at, that could be as much as $50 billion in new money.

By passing new emergency funds for the Iran war, Congress would also give Trump permission to continue it, experts say. This could involve giving the White House the argument that war is now legal, retroactively.

Sen. Angus King (I-ME) told NOTUS this week that “this is implicitly an authorization that I am not prepared to support.”

Experts share this view.

For Brian Finucane, senior advisor at the International Crisis Group and former State Department prosecutor, war is completely illegal without congressional approval. But presidents have used funding provided by Congress after initiating unauthorized conflicts to argue that those conflicts were legal retroactively, he said, citing President Bill Clinton’s operation in Kosovo in 1999. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel argued that the emergency funding allowed Clinton to exceed the 60-day deadline set by the War Powers Resolution.

That being said, the Trump administration has spent the last year ignoring Congress and flouting basic legal requirements. Last year, Finucane said, the Trump administration declared that its boat-bombing campaign in the Caribbean was not considered hostilities under the law days before the 60-day war powers deadline expired.

All of this leaves the power of Congress as the last real source of leverage.

“Congress simply cannot appropriate money,” Finucane said. “The White House can’t force Congress to appropriate funds, if Congress really wants to do it.”

Cash, but for what?

Neither the White House nor the Pentagon have said publicly what they plan to require in the expected legislation. But members of Congress expect the administration to request resupply of missile interceptors used to shoot down Iranian fire, according to news reports.

There’s a problem with this, a senior congressional official told TPM: The Trump administration already has enormous sums of money that Congress has appropriated, but not spent, for precisely this type of munitions.

The difference? There is nothing in the previous funding that could serve as a means by which Congress would approve military action.

TPM reviewed a declassified spending plan that the Pentagon provided to Congress, taking into account defense-related provisions of the OBBBA passed last year. Defense Insider was the first to report these recordings. They show that as of February, the Pentagon had billions of dollars appropriated by Congress to spend on munitions development and supply chains related to missile defense and other similar issues.

“I don’t think there’s a problem here if the Pentagon is so poorly funded that it wouldn’t be able to find the money somewhere to fill the gaps that it itself created by launching the war,” said Allison McManus, managing director of national security and international policy at American Progress.

It takes years to contract and manufacture the types of munitions that the Iran war is depleting, according to the top congressional aide. An emergency supplement would be redundant, the person argued: Congress has already allocated billions of dollars to expand the factories that make these interceptors and has ordered more, the person said.

“It takes a year to contract this product. It takes two years to make it,” the congressional aide told TPM. “So when we talk about supplements, in general, we’re talking about the eventual replacement of assets that we’ve already spent, that we’ve already used. I think that’s really important – that DoD can’t just turn around and buy these things from the store. We’re talking about placing long-term orders.”

For these long-term orders, the administration has billions to spend thanks to the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which includes defense-related provisions. To get more funding, it could wait until next fiscal year’s appropriations process or use its general transfer authority, which provides $6 billion in flexibility, to bypass its current base defense budget, Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal fiscal policy at the Center for American Progress, told TPM.

The result is that Congress has already approved enormous sums of money, and will have other chances to provide more, for what the top congressional aide described as the long process of replenishing weapons stockpiles – without giving the Trump administration permission to go to war.

“Not only do they have reconciliation funds that they haven’t used, but they also have regular appropriations. We also expect Trump to ask, in a few weeks, for a massive defense-based budget bill. That could be around $1.5 trillion,” the senior aide said. “So there’s definitely a lot of money in the pipeline and a lot more money to come.”