The Pentagon has asked for $200 billion in funding for the war in Iran, according to a military official and an administration official, a significant sum adding to the costs of an already divisive campaign.
The request has been sent to the White House, the military official said, which will review it before any request for funds is formally submitted to Congress. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the proposal. The request was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
“Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said when asked about the request during a news conference on Thursday, adding: “As far as the $200 billion, I think that number could move.”
On Capitol Hill, the sum — nearly a quarter of the country’s entire annual defense budget — is already raising eyebrows among some moderate Republicans who would be key to approving the funds.
“It’s considerably higher than I would have guessed, but I don’t know how it’s broken down,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the head of the chamber’s Appropriations Committee, told reporters Wednesday evening. The White House had not passed along any request to Congress, she said.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska and a key swing vote, said that the Trump administration would have to make a more concerted effort to engage Congress on the war before such a request could be approved.
“You just can’t come up here with an invoice and say, you know, ‘pay this’ and expect to have great cooperation going forward,” she told reporters on Wednesday.
It was not immediately clear how long the Pentagon intended for the $200 billion for the Iran war to last, or what operations it would cover. In 2014, the Congressional Research Service calculated that the United States spent $815 billion in direct costs for the war in Iraq over 13 years. A recent report from the Council on Foreign Relations, compiled from official government statistics, found that the United States had dedicated $188 billion in aid to shore up Ukraine’s war effort since Russia invaded in early 2022.
The funds for those wars were not approved as lump sums, but meted out over several appropriations cycles after extended, and oftentimes heated, debate about mounting costs.
Last week, Pentagon officials told lawmakers that the first six days of the war against Iran had cost more than $11.3 billion. Since then, President Trump has threatened to escalate the fighting, including floating the idea of putting American troops on the ground even as he has alternated the threats with suggestions that the United States might conclude its military campaign soon.
But the $200 billion figure suggests that the U.S. military is preparing for an extended engagement in Iran.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
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