Congressional Republicans Want to Cut Healthcare to Fund the War

The estimated cost of the conflict with Iran is $890 million per day.

The Trump Administration is spending billions of public dollars on its war with Iran. Just the first six days of the war cost a reported $12.7 billion. Weeks later, our tax dollars are being funneled to military defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, RTX, and L3Harris Technologies, which are also political donors and employ an army of lobbyists, and are now profiting by the billions. Last month, CNN estimated that the cost of the war would be roughly $890 million per day.

The real cost of any war is the lost lives and the grief of survivors. When in March the United States attacked a packed school in Iran, 168 people died, including over 100 children. As I write this, an estimated 3,000 people have been killed across the Middle East. According to NBC News, Israeli-U.S. strikes have killed 1,900 people in Iran; 1,200 people have died in Lebanon; 19 people have died in Israel. Thirteen United States servicemembers have been killed. As the Trump Administration has deployed 2,000 marines and paratroopers to the Middle East, thousands more Americans now have to worry about the safety of their loved ones.

What was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doing in the lead up to this war? According to a report from the Financial Times, Hegseth’s broker was trying to invest in millions of dollars worth of defense contractor mutual funds — whose value is tied to companies like RTX, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir, all of which potentially stood to gain from the current war. The trade didn’t go through. But these allegations follow a clear pattern for senior Trump Administration officials.

As we wrote previously, the newly confirmed Department of Homeland Security Secretary bought defense contractor stocks right before the U.S. invasion of Venezuela. Just because it’s becoming routine doesn’t mean we should get used to it: There is no world wherein the United States Secretary of Defense should have a personal financial stake in deploying more troops to conflict zones and bombing more people.

It gets worse. In a perverse new logic, Republicans in Congress are considering risking more American lives to fund Trump’s military campaign against Iran. Those American lives will not be risked in jet planes or battlefields but here, at home, because Congress is considering making cuts to healthcare spending to pay for the Trump Administration’s war.

Citing the costs of the war, Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX), chair of the House Budget Committee, has resuscitated an idea to make deep cuts to healthcare spending that Republicans originally floated last year, when working on the budget bill that ultimately cut $1.1 trillion in healthcare spending. Arrington’s proposal uses the pretext of fighting fraud and abuse — the same pretext Republicans have used against social safety net spending for decades and that Elon Musk used to justify DOGE taking a sledgehammer to everything from USAID to climate science programs. Since Arrington’s proposal is still an idea, we don’t yet know the particulars. But given that Republicans are reportedly searching to come up with $200 billion, there would have to be significant cuts to healthcare to make a dent in the costs of the ongoing war.

This revelation comes after both President Trump and Vice President JD Vance vowed during the 2024 campaign that they would not involve American troops in foreign wars, an extremely popular position with the American public after more than 7,000 Americans died during the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite the Trump/Vance promise of “no new wars,” Trump was so committed to “Operation Epic Fury” that he never asked Congress for approval to start this war.

We’ve likely just begun to feel the global disruption the war has already caused. Ten countries have taken retaliatory attacks from Iran. Already, as Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, the major passageway for oil tankers, global oil prices have risen quickly. In the United States, gas prices have spiked as much as 30%. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development anticipates that inflation in the US will be at 4.2% in 2026 and it cites the war as a major reason for rising costs.

Even if we look at the situation completely cynically, which is appropriate when considering this Congress, Republicans have self-interested reasons to reign in Trump and discourage him from continuing this completely illogical, let alone immoral, warpath. Another foreign war and ever-higher gas and grocery prices aren’t going to help Republican incumbents get reelected. But Congressional Republicans are so committed to fealty to Trump and his destruction that they blocked legislation that would have limited Trump’s war powers.

Last month, for El Pais, Carlos Manuel Alvarez wrote about Trump’s bragging threats that once he’s through with Iran, he can do whatever he wants to Cuba and observed that there’s something clarifying about “the level of shamelessness [which] destroys the rhetorical refuges of minor political actors, who have nowhere to hide.” In other words, because Trump is so openly cruel and callous, his allies can’t hide behind the usual political language and pretexts to keep up an appearance of civility or decency.

When reading about Republicans’ proposal to fund a deeply unpopular and destructive war with money allotted for Americans’ healthcare, I was reminded of that observation. In this case, Congressional Republicans have nowhere to hide. It’s right out in the open that they consider everyday people expendable.