Week 79: War Funding, Vanishing Casualties, and a Voting Bill Riding Shotgun on Defense Policy

“`markdown This was a week in which the gap between what Washington said and what Washington did became the story itself. The Iran war entered its fifth month with the Pentagon asking for tens of billions more in funding even as it grew less transparent about the war’s human cost, while House Republicans used a defense bill to carry voting restrictions that could not pass on their own, and states lined up in federal court to challenge a push to tie disaster aid to election rules. By week’s end, Congress had voted twice to assert control over a war it could not actually stop, and the administration had extended its reach from the battlefield into the halls of the Smithsonian.

The weekend set the tone. President Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to flag noncitizens on state voter rolls and pressed Congress to pass the Save America Act, while Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened state officials with prosecution for declining to use a verification tool that courts had already blocked. Stephen Bannon floated invoking a national-security emergency order to force the law through. At the same time, Secretary of State Rubio warned of "Radical Left terrorism" even as data continued to show right-wing political violence far more prevalent — rhetoric delivered against a backdrop of hundreds of coordinated protests over ICE shootings, voter suppression, and AI datacenter expansion. Also emerging over the weekend was the first indication of a story that would recur all week: in the days before an Iranian strike killed two U.S. soldiers, the Pentagon had not disclosed three earlier attacks on American forces in Jordan that injured dozens of troops. A federal immigration agent with a documented history of domestic violence allegedly shot and killed a Colombian immigrant in Maine, and reporting indicated the FBI had quietly stopped investigating ICE confrontations despite a string of killings, even as DOJ and DHS denied it. Amid this, the Third Circuit became the first federal appeals court to strike down a state assault weapons ban, setting up likely Supreme Court review of similar laws in more than ten states, and the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law over Trump’s objection — a rare legislative achievement as the House Judiciary chair acknowledged Congress was essentially finished legislating before the midterms.

By Monday, the administration’s attention turned outward and backward at once. Trump signed three proclamations imposing 50 percent tariffs on Canadian automobiles, dairy, and alcohol, citing discriminatory trade practices and wildfire smoke; Canadian officials called it a violation of the USMCA and warned of damage to a decades-long alliance. The Justice Department sought broad phone records belonging to New York Times reporters and their relatives in connection with reporting on a Qatar-donated Air Force One, before withdrawing the subpoenas amid accusations of intimidation. A ceremonial Captive Nations Week proclamation framed communism as the gravest foreign threat in language that blurred the line between authoritarian regimes abroad and political dissent at home. Meanwhile, gasoline hit $4 a gallon nationally and Brent crude surged past $91 as the widening Iran conflict rattled energy markets. The ACLU sued HHS over a childcare funding freeze based on unverified claims from a viral video, the Justice Department found UC San Diego’s medical school had violated civil rights law through its admissions practices, and reporting revealed that corporate PACs — SpaceX, Home Depot, Walmart, Toyota, and Google among them — had funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawmakers sponsoring bills expanding ICE’s authority. In a smaller but telling counter-development, ICE announced it would require body cameras for vehicle stops following the fatal shootings, and Citizens Bank ended its financing relationships with private prison operators running ICE facilities.

Tuesday brought the week’s first direct reckoning over the war’s true scope. Defense Secretary Hegseth appeared before the Senate requesting a $454 billion defense budget increase along with $67 billion in emergency Iran war funding, and senators from both parties pressed him on contradictions — about Iran’s remaining military capability, about unauthorized strikes in the Caribbean, and about whether the war had any congressional authorization at all. The same day, Trump declared that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu would not be arrested in the United States under any circumstances, overriding an outstanding International Criminal Court warrant and asserting personal authority over a matter normally left to domestic law enforcement. Courts, meanwhile, delivered a mixed set of rulings: a fired U.S. Attorney sued over his removal less than an hour after being appointed, a federal appeals court upheld Peter Navarro’s contempt convictions, and a Washington suburb ended a license-plate surveillance contract after documented abuse — even as reporting showed ICE had failed to equip most officers with body cameras despite having the funding to do so. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced withholding more than $1 billion in additional Medicaid funds from California and Minnesota based on unsubstantiated fraud claims, layered atop funds already withheld since the previous year. Trump’s own rhetoric sharpened further: he posted that Iran would "pay many times over" for the dead soldiers, falsely blamed immigrants for a fire actually set by a U.S. Army veteran, and mischaracterized Venezuela’s crisis as a natural disaster.

Wednesday was when the voting-restrictions storyline fused formally with war funding. The House passed a $95 billion budget resolution allocating $73 billion for Iran war operations, $12 billion in farm aid, and $10 billion toward advancing the Save America Act — using the reconciliation process specifically to bypass the Senate filibuster. The same day, Brent crude climbed above $94 a barrel, Arizona terminated SNAP benefits for 440,000 residents under cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the TSA began privatizing airport security screening at two airports, unwinding a post-9/11 federal safeguard. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan referred former special counsel Jack Smith to the acting attorney general over alleged false testimony, a move Smith’s lawyers called retaliation for his investigation of the president. Separate reporting found the United States had collected more than $13 billion from Venezuelan oil sales with no public accounting, an external review of the Gates Foundation documented roughly thirty undisclosed meetings between Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein between 2011 and 2014, and a federal judge ordered Trump to disclose financial details in his defamation suit against the BBC. In Madison, Wisconsin, a police officer fatally shot a man during an arrest, an incident captured on video that triggered local protests and a state-led independent investigation.

Thursday was arguably the week’s hinge point for war oversight. The House passed a $1.15 trillion defense authorization bill that incorporated the Save America Act’s mail-ballot ban and voter ID mandates alongside expanded U.S.-Israel defense cooperation — embedding a contested election policy inside legislation that is, in ordinary years, considered must-pass. On the same day, it emerged that the Pentagon had quietly reduced its official Iran war death toll from eighteen to fourteen, removing four service members killed after a declared ceasefire, a revision critics said appeared designed to avoid triggering war powers requirements tied to casualty thresholds. Trump told reporters he was close to deciding on a "massive attack" on Iran larger than any prior operation, and separately threatened to bomb Iranian bridges or power plants — a threat against civilian infrastructure that would, if carried out, violate international law. The administration also imposed new 10 to 12.5 percent tariffs on goods from more than eighty countries, citing forced-labor enforcement failures and invoking a different statutory authority than the one the Supreme Court had struck down months earlier; two small businesses immediately sued, even as the U.S. trade representative told the Senate tariffs were not raising prices, contradicting both inflation data and senators’ own cost estimates. Brent crude crossed $100 a barrel that day, up 42 percent in twenty days, following Houthi attacks on Saudi tankers and Iranian strikes near the Iraq-Kuwait border. Separate reporting detailed that officials overseeing $58.5 billion in Pentagon AI spending and a $20 billion private-equity-styled investment office held undisclosed personal financial stakes in related ventures, one tied to a Trump family member, while Jim Jordan’s referral of Jack Smith was formalized and former Barclays CEO Jes Staley testified before Congress about his past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Friday brought the week’s attempt at congressional reassertion — and its limits. The House passed, for the second time, a resolution directing Trump to end hostilities with Iran, joined by four Republicans, but the Senate narrowly rejected a nearly identical measure by a 47-49 vote. A senior Democrat moved to force litigation compelling compliance with existing war powers obligations the administration had simply ignored. The same day, a coalition of twenty-five states and the District of Columbia sued over FEMA and DHS conditions requiring paper ballots, citizenship verification, and immigration enforcement cooperation as prerequisites for more than $1 billion and $740 million in federal disaster and security grants. Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to post signage outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History warning visitors of alleged "ideological capture" and pointing them to alternative historical sources — a formal federal directive, backed by physical signage, extending a rhetorical campaign against the museum’s curatorial independence into government action. Courts again delivered a mixed record: judges blocked the termination of work authorization for asylum seekers and TPS holders, ruled FDA restrictions on mifepristone arbitrary and ordered reconsideration, and the Fourth Circuit rejected an attempt to redetain a Georgetown scholar over pro-Palestinian speech, while a dozen states won a temporary block on the Paramount-Warner Bros merger. But a federal panel declined to block a Tennessee redistricting map that splits Memphis’s Black population across three districts. The Justice Department sued Milwaukee over its ban on masked, unidentified federal agents and sued Colorado over in-state tuition for undocumented students — its fourteenth such suit nationally — while Trump ordered ICE to resume vehicle stops despite a safety suspension put in place after a fatal shooting, even as a congressional briefing revealed only one disciplinary referral among fifty-six excessive-force complaints against ICE officers. The week closed with reporting that federal debt held by the public had exceeded 100 percent of GDP, even as the administration requested an additional $11.1 billion in agricultural assistance, pushing total 2026 farm support above $55 billion.

Taken as a whole, the week illustrated how difficult it has become to separate the machinery of war from the machinery of domestic politics. A defense budget swelled while the public accounting of the war it funded grew less reliable, not more. Congress exercised its constitutional war powers twice and was overruled or ignored both times, while a policy that could not survive ordinary legislative debate was carried instead inside a bill few in Congress would vote against. States went to court by the dozens to defend their authority over elections and disaster relief, courts split between checking and permitting executive action, and an order aimed at how history itself is presented in a national museum showed that the week’s exercises of power were not confined to the battlefield or the ballot box. Nothing was resolved by Friday; much of it had simply been pushed, unresolved, into the weeks ahead. “`