Hegseth and Gen. Caine to Testify Tuesday on $80 Billion Iran War Funding Request

War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine are set to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee at 10 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, according to Just The News. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins is also expected to appear.

The hearing centers on an $80 billion supplemental funding request from the White House. Roughly $67 billion of that is earmarked directly for the conflict with Iran, according to Just The News. Clash Report puts the total request slightly higher, at $87.6 billion, with $67.1 billion in direct military funding for this year. The discrepancy is small and likely reflects rounding or different accounting windows, but either way the number is enormous for a war Congress never voted to authorize.

The timing is brutal. Just The News reports U.S. forces have been launching attacks on Iran for 10 days, while Clash Report describes U.S. and Iranian forces trading strikes for nine consecutive nights — the exact count varies by source, but both agree the exchanges have been ongoing for well over a week. Just days before the hearing, two American service members were killed in an attack in Jordan and a third died detonating an Iranian drone, according to Just The News. Clash Report reports the broader U.S. military death toll has reached 17 since hostilities began in late February. The Pentagon has also confirmed nearly 100 American troops have been injured overall, though the department says 96% of them have returned to duty, according to Just The News.

Congress Never Voted on This

President Trump notified lawmakers that these strikes were carried out strictly under his commander-in-chief authority, according to Clash Report, brushing past prior bipartisan war powers resolutions passed in both chambers. That's not a new move for presidents of either party, but it's still Congress's constitutional job to declare war and control the purse. Right now lawmakers are being asked to write the check after the fact, for a campaign they had no vote on.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is pushing to fund the troops first and hash out the constitutional questions later. "The greatest fighting force on the planet, the last great superpower, must be fully equipped, and that's the job of Congress to make sure it's done," Johnson said, according to Clash Report. That's a defensible position. Troops in the field need supplies regardless of how anyone feels about how they got there, and starving an active operation of funding has its own real-world consequences for the people wearing the uniform.

But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is asking the question a lot of Americans are asking too. "If the Republicans want our votes, they should provide a credible strategy," Schumer said, according to Clash Report. "How long it lasts, where does it end, what our goals are. Very simple. They haven't." That's a fair demand. Nobody, including apparently many members of Congress, has been given a clear exit plan or a defined objective for this war.

The dissent isn't only coming from Democrats. Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on Armed Services who had previously supported advancing the annual defense policy bill in committee, voted against moving it forward. "I cannot vote to proceed to a bill that enables an ongoing war against Iran that Congress never authorized," Reed said, according to Clash Report. That's a Democrat breaking from party leadership's usual posture, and it underscores that this isn't a clean partisan split. It's an institutional one, about whether Congress still functions as a check on the executive when it comes to war.

This is primarily a GOP problem heading into midterms, with Republicans cornered into funding an unpopular war they never authorized while their House and Senate majorities are at risk, according to Clash Report. That framing has some truth to it politically, but it undersells that this is a bipartisan institutional failure. Republicans control both chambers right now. If lawmakers wanted a formal vote on war authorization before money moved, they had the votes to force one. They haven't.

Tuesday's hearing is where all of this collides. Hegseth and Caine will have to answer for troop deaths, the drone strike that killed a U.S. service member, and nearly 100 injuries, while asking the same committee for $80 billion with no publicly disclosed end date or strategic objective. Whether senators actually get straight answers on timeline and endgame, or whether the hearing turns into a rubber stamp for a war already well underway, is the open question going into Tuesday morning.