Hegseth Faces Lawmakers Over Iran War Costs as Conflict Widens

Pete Hegseth Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images Photo by Alex Wong /Getty Images

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(Bloomberg) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is set to testify before lawmakers for the first time in more than two months to defend the Trump administration’s request for billions of dollars in additional money for the Iran war and address growing public skepticism about the course of the conflict.

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Hegseth’s appearance before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday afternoon will be focused on President Donald Trump’s $87.6 billion supplemental funding request — the bulk of it intended for the armed forces — but he will almost certainly face questions about the collapse of a ceasefire, the deaths over the weekend of three service members and signals that the US is escalating the war.

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It’s a markedly different moment from Hegseth’s previous appearance on Capitol Hill in mid-May or his combative press conferences during the war’s opening weeks, when he argued that the military campaign was proceeding according to Trump’s timetable. Hegseth stopped doing those public appearances or talking about the war as the two sides forged a truce and then as that agreement collapsed.

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“They’ll be asked about the cost of the war, whether there’s more costs than what is in the supplemental, exactly what the supplemental is going to do, and then there’ll be the usual questions — what’s the state of operations on the ground, what’s the end game?” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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Lawmakers are likely to inquire about whether the Defense Department plans to ask Congress for even more money to finance the war that began on Feb. 28. The Pentagon said in June that it would seek $80 billion in emergency funding to cover the cost of the war. Trump later requested $67.1 billion for the Defense Department to cover war costs, but provided little detail on how the money would be spent.

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In testimony this spring, Hegseth declined to give a breakdown of costs as he faced questions from frustrated lawmakers, who also failed to get an updated cost estimate for the conflict from Jules Hurst, the administration’s nominee to be Pentagon’s budget chief, in a hearing last week. 

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Hurst had previously estimated in mid-May that the price tag for the Iran war had risen to roughly $29 billion — a figure that many analysts and lawmakers believed to be unrealistically low at the time.

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The Tuesday hearing may provide the clearest indication yet of whether the Pentagon views the campaign as a relatively short-term operation or the beginning of a more sustained effort requiring additional resources and even more high-end munitions. The war has proved unpopular with Americans, and has raised energy and consumer prices around the world.

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The defense subcommittees have already examined the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion fiscal 2027 budget request. That total includes $350 billion the administration is seeking through separate mandatory funding legislation, rather than the annual defense appropriations bill. Because Congress has yet to approve that funding mechanism, key appropriators have questioned whether the full $350 billion will ultimately be enacted.