Trump’s war on Iran is illegal. Congress hasn’t authorized it; administration officials are still struggling, two weeks in, to define why they started it and what they’re hoping to achieve.
But there’s a way that the Trump administration could obtain a kind of approval from Congress — one that Presidents have used as a backdoor greenlight for war. And, reports say, it’s on its way to doing so. The administration is expected to ask Congress to pass an emergency supplemental funding bill. Depending on which report you consult, that could be up to $50 billion in new money.
By passing new emergency funding for the Iran war, Congress would also give Trump authorization to continue it, experts say. That could mean giving the White House an argument that the war is now, retroactively, legal.
Sen. Angus King (I-ME) told NOTUS this week that “it implicitly is an authorization, which I’m not prepared to support.”
Experts echo that view.
To Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group and a former State Department attorney, the war is entirely illegal absent approval from Congress. But presidents have used funding that Congress passed after they started unauthorized conflicts to argue that they’re retroactively legal, he said, citing President Bill Clinton’s 1999 operation in Kosovo. There, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel argued that the emergency funding authorized Clinton to go beyond the 60-day time limit set by the War Powers Resolution.
That being said, the Trump administration has spent the past year ignoring Congress and flouting basic legal requirements. Last year, Finucane said, the Trump administration declared that its Caribbean boat bombing campaign did not qualify as hostilities under the law days before the 60-day war powers clock ran out.
All of that leaves Congress’ power of the purse as its last real source of leverage.
“Congress can simply not appropriate money,” Finucane said. “The White House can’t force Congress to appropriate money, if Congress really wants to dig its heels in.”
Cash, but for what?
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon have said publicly what they plan on requesting in the expected legislation. But members of Congress expect the administration to ask for the replenishment of missile interceptors used to shoot down incoming Iranian fire, per press reports.
There’s a problem with that, a senior congressional aide told TPM: the Trump administration already has a huge amount of money that Congress has appropriated, but not spent, exactly for these kinds of munitions.
The difference? There’s nothing in the previous funding that could serve as a means by which Congress has approved military action.
TPM reviewed a declassified spending plan that the Pentagon provided to Congress, taking account of the defense-related provisions of the OBBBA passed last year. Defense Insider first reported the records. They show that, as of February, the Pentagon had billions in congressionally appropriated dollars to spend on munitions and supply chain development related to missile defense and other similar issues.
“I don’t think there is an issue here of the Pentagon being so poorly funded that they wouldn’t be able to find the money somewhere to be able to address the gaps that they have themselves created in launching the war,” said Allison McManus, managing director for the National Security and International Policy department at American Progress.
It takes years to both contract and manufacture the kinds of munitions that the Iran war is depleting, per the senior congressional aide. An emergency supplemental would be redundant, the person argued: Congress has already allocated billions of dollars to expand the factories that make these interceptors and ordered more, the person said.
“It takes a year to put this stuff under contract. It takes two years to manufacture the stuff,” the congressional aide told TPM. “So when we talk about supplementals, generally, we’re talking about eventually replacing the assets that we’ve already spent, 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 those long-term orders, the administration has billions to spend from the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which includes defense-related provisions. For more funding, it could wait for the next fiscal year’s appropriations process or use its general transfer authority, which provides $6 billion of flexibility, to move around their current base defense budget, Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at Center for American Progress, told TPM.
The upshot is that Congress has already passed huge amounts of money, and will have other chances to pass more money, for what the senior congressional aide described as the lengthy process to replenish weapons stocks — without giving the Trump administration an authorization to go to war.
“Not only do they have the reconciliation funds that they haven’t used, they also have just regular appropriations. We also expect Trump to request, in a matter of weeks, a massive defense base budget bill. That could be around $1.5 trillion,” said the senior aide. “So there’s certainly a lot of money in the pipeline and a lot more money coming down the pipeline.”
