April 21, 2026
Stephen Prager
Tom Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), spoke at Chatham House on Monday about a “cataclysmic” funding crisis for the UN, in large part due to the termination of billions of dollars in funding from the US and other major powers such as the UK. Fletcher said his agency has seen its budget cut by around 50%.
“We’re already overstretched, under-resourced, and literally under attack,” Fletcher said, citing the more than 1,000 humanitarians who have been killed in conflicts around the world over the past three years.
The Iran war, launched at the end of February by the US and Israel, Fletcher said, has stretched UN budgets even further, both by causing chaos within Iran and Lebanon—where more than 5,000 people in total have been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 4 million displaced collectively—but also by creating economic upheaval that has exacerbated crises elsewhere.
“You have the [Strait] of Hormuz—fuel prices up 20%, food prices up almost 20%, our humanitarian convoys blocked,” Fletcher said. “We’ve had to take those convoys by air and by land. And the impact, which I think we’ll be feeling for years, of those price rises on Sub-Saharan and East Africa, pushing way more people into poverty.”
Fletcher said that just a fraction of what the US has spent waging the war could have been used to provide a full year of funding for a plan he laid out in January to provide lifesaving food, water, medicine, and shelter to those in dozens of countries facing war and poverty.
“For every day of this conflict, $2 billion is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritized plan to save 87 million lives is $23 billion,” he said. “We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”
Beyond the financial toll, he said, US actions may have done irreparable damage to the authority of international humanitarian law and to UN bodies tasked with enforcing it.
He noted the dramatic increase in the number of humanitarian workers killed around the world over the past three years. According to a UN report earlier this month, of the more than 1,010 of them who were killed in the line of duty, over half were killed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza and escalating attacks in the West Bank.
“A thousand dead humanitarians in three years,” Fletcher said. “When did that become normal?”
He called out the UN Security Council, where the US is one of the permanent members with veto power, for its weak responses to the killing of humanitarians and other flagrant violations of the laws of war.
“Don’t just give us a generic statement where you say humanitarian workers should be protected,” he said. “Make the phone call, call out the people killing us, stop arming those who are doing it.”
He said “big powers” view geopolitics in a highly “transactional” way and do not use the Security Council as a mechanism for defending international humanitarian law.
“I wouldn’t have thought I’d need to say that a couple of years ago, that the Security Council should be defending international humanitarian law, and yet here we are,” he said.
He said that Trump’s recent violent rhetoric toward Iran—which again verged into outright genocidal territory over the weekend when he pledged to “blow up the entire country” with overwhelming attacks on civilian infrastructure—has only further corroded international law.
“The idea that suddenly it’s okay to say, ‘We’re going to blow stuff up,’ ‘We’re going to bomb you back to the Stone Age,’ ‘We’re going to destroy your civilization,’ that kind of language is really dangerous,” Fletcher said. “It gives more freedom to all the other wannabe autocrats around the world to use that sort of language.”
But he said the aggression of the US and its allies has also made the world more warlike and less “generous,” leading countries to put more money into defense that could otherwise go toward alleviating global suffering.
“Whether you’re making the cuts [to UN funding] for ideological reasons or because you’re too busy bombing someone else or because now you feel more insecure at home and so you have to invest more of your money in defense and less in generosity,” he said, “all of that ultimately has an impact on the over 300 million people that we’re here to serve.”
Steven Harper
Let’s count the ways.
“Regime Change”
No one doubted the capacity of the US armed forces to decimate Iran’s far inferior military force. But to what end?
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Trump that launching the attack would prompt a popular uprising that would lead to the overthrow of Iran’s theocracy. Listening to Netanyahu’s assertion, CIA Director John Ratcliffe called it “farcical.” Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio translated that word into language Trump would understand, “In other words, it’s bullshit.”
Trump chose to believe Netanyahu. Announcing the US-Israeli assault, Trump told Iranians that this was their opportunity to reclaim their country. To win the war on Trump’s terms, the Iranian theocracy needed only to survive.
The attack killed the Supreme Leader of Iran and top members of the government. But immediately, the serpent grew another head—the Supreme Leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who had lost his wife and teenage son in the bombing. The new leader is known for deep, long-standing ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) security establishment. His appointment signaled a transition to a more heavily militarized, hard-line, and anti-Western regime.
Trump calls this “regime change.” By his definition, Admiral Karl Dönitz succeeding Adolf Hitler as head of the German state near the end of World War II constituted regime change too.
The Iran theocracy survived in an even more militant form.
Score: Iran 1, Trump 0
“Contain Iran”
Trump boasted that the war would restrain Iran’s ability to project power:
“We are systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders,” he said.
Trump then described the destruction of Iran’s navy, air force, missile facilities, and defense industrial base. Those were tactical successes, but the war itself has been a strategic failure.
Iran’s response included attacks on neighboring countries. Even more troubling, it discovered and deployed a powerful new weapon: blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Notwithstanding its decimated navy, Iran now has a choke hold on the global economy.
Netanyahu had assured Trump that the regime would be so weakened from the US-Israeli assault that it would be unable to block the waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil flowed. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the strait and the risks of Iran blocking it. But Trump dismissed that possibility on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before that could happen.
With the price of oil skyrocketing, Trump has created a new problem for the entire world and powerful leverage for Iran.
Score: Iran 2, Trump 0
“No Nuclear Weapons”
In his June 2025 attack on Iran, Trump claimed to have “obliterated” its nuclear facilities. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went further, saying that not only were the facilities obliterated, but so too were Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Subsequently, Trump took repeated victory laps over the mission:
Trump’s tactics—bombing—won’t work. Knowledgeable experts believe that a key Iranian nuclear facility is Pickaxe Mountain, where some of its uranium may be stored. That facility is so far below the ground that even America’s 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs can’t reach its inner chamber.
Trump talks about “going in” and taking the nuclear material out. But a ground operation to retrieve the material or destroy the facility would entail tremendous risk to those attempting it while providing, at best, an uncertain outcome.
The threat of a nuclear Iran remains.
Score: Iran 3, Trump 0
False Declarations of Victory That Backfire
Trump’s bluster isn’t working with Iranian leaders. His threats to commit war crimes dominate news cycles, but they merely reveal to Iran Trump’s desperation to extricate himself from the mess he created. As a negotiating strategy, it’s counterproductive.
Trump’s persistent boasts about tactical victories against Iran’ s military ignore the fundamental strategic fact that Trump has lost the Iran war. If a deal emerges from discussions between Iran’s experienced negotiators and Trump’s collection of amateurs, America and the world will pay a big price for a long time.
David Vine
Despite a two-week ceasefire and diplomatic negotiations with Iran, Trump has deployed thousands of additional troops to the Middle East, while “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has made renewed threats to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure, widely considered a war crime. For the next fiscal year, Trump has requested the largest military budget in US history, $1.5 trillion. He has also indicated he will ask for up to $200 billion more to fund the war in Iran. By all indications, Trump looks likely to return to war, if not in Iran, somewhere else.
Trump’s embrace of endless wars already has killed and injured tens of thousands, displaced millions, squandered tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, driven up prices on gas and other necessities, created a global economic crisis, and risked wider catastrophe and World War III. And don’t forget Trump’s genocidal threats to “wipe out” Iranian civilization, implying a potential nuclear attack.
Faced with the threat of more endless war in Iran and beyond, Congress must do everything in its power to stop Trump. One tool Congress hasn’t used is its power to immediately cut off money for wars in Iran and beyond. With constitutional authority over government spending, Congress can use its rescission power—that is, the power to rescind, or take back, money previously appropriated to government agencies. Specifically, Congress should rescind around one-third of this year’s discretionary budgets for the “Department of War” and Department of Energy, where nuclear weapons spending is hidden, while avoiding cuts that would harm military personnel and their families.
Cutting $350 billion in discretionary spending from the over $1 trillion war budgets would actually help protect the troops by making it harder, if not impossible, for Trump to deploy them into harm’s way to fight his wars. While a $350 billion cut may sound daunting, it would leave the country with a total military budget far larger than that of China and Russia combined and allow the military to focus on defending the country rather than squandering billions on endless wars.
While only two Republican Congress members have voted to stop Trump’s war in Iran, Democrats should advance a rescissions bill to continue to apply pressure to end the war in Iran and show they won’t fund another day of endless war. While a rescissions bill is unlikely to pass now, we may soon see more Republicans defecting from Trump’s sinking presidency and increasingly unhinged behavior. While a rescissions bill of this sort may break with congressional precedent, the future of the country and the world is at stake. Extraordinary threats demand extraordinary measures.
Cutting the War Budget Now
Given what we’ve seen from Trump, how can he be trusted to continue to control a military budget that already exceeds $1 trillion? Doing so is to almost literally leave loaded guns in the hands of an increasingly erratic and dangerous man.
The danger Trump poses underlines the desperate need to get Trump out of office as quickly as possible through impeachment or the 25th Amendment. Amid these efforts and continued attempts to pass Iran War Powers Resolutions to prevent Trump from waging war without congressional approval, Congress should help protect the country and the world by removing the funds available to Trump to make more war.
Allowing Donald Trump to continue to control the entirety of this year’s Pentagon budget—let alone a larger one next year—risks his not only continuing his immoral, illegal war in Iran but also his likely launching new wars, including, for example, in Cuba and most frightening of all with China.
Congress has the power to take back money it’s previously appropriated to the Pentagon just as it has passed thousands of rescissions bills to take back all kinds of funding it previously approved.
There are at least three forms a rescissions bill could take. Under each, the bill won’t take pay or services from military personnel or their family members. It will instead take money from weapons makers and others profiting off war and budgets that make the military an offensive, endless war fighting force. A rescissions bill could rescind money for war and:
Is It Realistic?
A rescissions bill is unlikely to pass in today’s Congress. To now, only two Republicans have voted for War Powers Resolutions to stop the war in Iran. However, the resolutions failed by just a few votes given the tiny Republican majority in Congress. And we don’t know what Congress will look like in one month or three, when more Republicans may abandon Trump.
Democrats and others shouldn’t be afraid of the tired shibboleth that military spending is about “supporting the troops”—it is increasingly obvious that increasingly large military budgets have made it easier to wage offensive, catastrophic wars of choice that have put troops in harm’s way, causing tens of thousands of troop deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries, in addition to millions more dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, and far beyond.
Even if a rescissions bill can’t pass now, it can be another way to pressure the administration to end the US-Israeli war in Iran and Lebanon. Along with war powers resolutions, a rescissions bill is another way to demonstrate continuing opposition to this and other endless wars. It’s a way to keep the media focused on a war that’s been all too distant from many people’s lives in the US. It’s a way to do everything humanly possible to stop wars that have already killed and injured tens of thousands and that could exceed the catastrophe of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq if they continue.
A rescissions bill will also allow constituents and journalists to ask Congress members and midterm candidates, “Do you want to fund more endless war or do you think Congress should take money back from the Pentagon to prevent more war and fund things we need? Do you think we can trust Trump with the current Pentagon budget or not? Do you think we can trust that Trump won’t use the out-of-control military budget to restart the war with Iran and start new wars, most terrifyingly a potential nuclear war with China?”
A rescissions bill also gives politicians an opportunity to vote “yes” to cut the Pentagon budget; “yes” to a peace dividend; “yes” to using taxpayer money to actually defend the country and improve national security; “yes” to a rational, realistic, defense-focused military budget rather than a military budget designed for offensive wars.
While Trump has trashed his promise to “stop wars” not start them, Congress has the power to pass a rescissions bill that would protect the country and the world from more endless war while transforming the US military into the defensive force it should be.
Stephen Prager
A UN official said a proposal to
provide food, water, medicine, and shelter to tens of millions of those facing
war and poverty could have been funded “in less than a fortnight of this
reckless war.”
US President Donald Trump’s war
in Iran is costing nearly $2 billion per day, according to a Harvard analysis
based on estimates from the Pentagon. The head of the United Nations’
humanitarian agency said the money could instead be used to save more than 87
million lives around the world.
Tom Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), spoke at Chatham House on Monday about a “cataclysmic” funding crisis for the UN, in large part due to the termination of billions of dollars in funding from the US and other major powers such as the UK. Fletcher said his agency has seen its budget cut by around 50%.
“We’re already overstretched, under-resourced, and literally under attack,” Fletcher said, citing the more than 1,000 humanitarians who have been killed in conflicts around the world over the past three years.
The Iran war, launched at the end of February by the US and Israel, Fletcher said, has stretched UN budgets even further, both by causing chaos within Iran and Lebanon—where more than 5,000 people in total have been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 4 million displaced collectively—but also by creating economic upheaval that has exacerbated crises elsewhere.
“You have the [Strait] of Hormuz—fuel prices up 20%, food prices up almost 20%, our humanitarian convoys blocked,” Fletcher said. “We’ve had to take those convoys by air and by land. And the impact, which I think we’ll be feeling for years, of those price rises on Sub-Saharan and East Africa, pushing way more people into poverty.”
Fletcher said that just a fraction of what the US has spent waging the war could have been used to provide a full year of funding for a plan he laid out in January to provide lifesaving food, water, medicine, and shelter to those in dozens of countries facing war and poverty.
“For every day of this conflict, $2 billion is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritized plan to save 87 million lives is $23 billion,” he said. “We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”
Beyond the financial toll, he said, US actions may have done irreparable damage to the authority of international humanitarian law and to UN bodies tasked with enforcing it.
He noted the dramatic increase in the number of humanitarian workers killed around the world over the past three years. According to a UN report earlier this month, of the more than 1,010 of them who were killed in the line of duty, over half were killed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza and escalating attacks in the West Bank.
“A thousand dead humanitarians in three years,” Fletcher said. “When did that become normal?”
He called out the UN Security Council, where the US is one of the permanent members with veto power, for its weak responses to the killing of humanitarians and other flagrant violations of the laws of war.
“Don’t just give us a generic statement where you say humanitarian workers should be protected,” he said. “Make the phone call, call out the people killing us, stop arming those who are doing it.”
He said “big powers” view geopolitics in a highly “transactional” way and do not use the Security Council as a mechanism for defending international humanitarian law.
“I wouldn’t have thought I’d need to say that a couple of years ago, that the Security Council should be defending international humanitarian law, and yet here we are,” he said.
He said that Trump’s recent violent rhetoric toward Iran—which again verged into outright genocidal territory over the weekend when he pledged to “blow up the entire country” with overwhelming attacks on civilian infrastructure—has only further corroded international law.
“The idea that suddenly it’s okay to say, ‘We’re going to blow stuff up,’ ‘We’re going to bomb you back to the Stone Age,’ ‘We’re going to destroy your civilization,’ that kind of language is really dangerous,” Fletcher said. “It gives more freedom to all the other wannabe autocrats around the world to use that sort of language.”
But he said the aggression of the US and its allies has also made the world more warlike and less “generous,” leading countries to put more money into defense that could otherwise go toward alleviating global suffering.
“Whether you’re making the cuts [to UN funding] for ideological reasons or because you’re too busy bombing someone else or because now you feel more insecure at home and so you have to invest more of your money in defense and less in generosity,” he said, “all of that ultimately has an impact on the over 300 million people that we’re here to serve.”
Steven Harper
President Donald Trump’s
persistent boasts about tactical victories against Iran’ s military ignore the
fundamental strategic fact that Trump has lost the Iran war.
When he declared war on Iran in
violation of international law and the US Constitution, President Donald Trump
announced several objectives. He claims to have won the war, but Iran is
emerging as the long-term victor.Let’s count the ways.
“Regime Change”
No one doubted the capacity of the US armed forces to decimate Iran’s far inferior military force. But to what end?
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Trump that launching the attack would prompt a popular uprising that would lead to the overthrow of Iran’s theocracy. Listening to Netanyahu’s assertion, CIA Director John Ratcliffe called it “farcical.” Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio translated that word into language Trump would understand, “In other words, it’s bullshit.”
Trump chose to believe Netanyahu. Announcing the US-Israeli assault, Trump told Iranians that this was their opportunity to reclaim their country. To win the war on Trump’s terms, the Iranian theocracy needed only to survive.
The attack killed the Supreme Leader of Iran and top members of the government. But immediately, the serpent grew another head—the Supreme Leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who had lost his wife and teenage son in the bombing. The new leader is known for deep, long-standing ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) security establishment. His appointment signaled a transition to a more heavily militarized, hard-line, and anti-Western regime.
Trump calls this “regime change.” By his definition, Admiral Karl Dönitz succeeding Adolf Hitler as head of the German state near the end of World War II constituted regime change too.
The Iran theocracy survived in an even more militant form.
Score: Iran 1, Trump 0
“Contain Iran”
Trump boasted that the war would restrain Iran’s ability to project power:
“We are systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders,” he said.
Trump then described the destruction of Iran’s navy, air force, missile facilities, and defense industrial base. Those were tactical successes, but the war itself has been a strategic failure.
Iran’s response included attacks on neighboring countries. Even more troubling, it discovered and deployed a powerful new weapon: blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Notwithstanding its decimated navy, Iran now has a choke hold on the global economy.
Netanyahu had assured Trump that the regime would be so weakened from the US-Israeli assault that it would be unable to block the waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil flowed. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the strait and the risks of Iran blocking it. But Trump dismissed that possibility on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before that could happen.
With the price of oil skyrocketing, Trump has created a new problem for the entire world and powerful leverage for Iran.
Score: Iran 2, Trump 0
“No Nuclear Weapons”
In his June 2025 attack on Iran, Trump claimed to have “obliterated” its nuclear facilities. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went further, saying that not only were the facilities obliterated, but so too were Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Subsequently, Trump took repeated victory laps over the mission:
- “It knocked out their entire potential nuclear capacity.” (July 16)
- “It’s been obliterated.” (July 31)
- “We obliterated… the future nuclear capability of Iran.” (August 18)
- “But I also obliterated Iran’s nuclear hopes, by totally annihilating their enriched uranium.” (September 20)
- “Well, they don’t have a nuclear program. It was obliterated.” (October 13)
- “…completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability.” (November 11)
- “It was called Iran and its nuclear capability, and we obliterated that very quickly and strongly and powerfully.” (November 19)
- “We obliterated their nuclear capability.” (December 11)
- “We knocked out the Iran nuclear threat, and it was obliterated.” (January 8)
- “…obliterated Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability.” (January 20)
- “…achieving total obliteration of the Iran nuclear potential capability—totally obliterated.” (February 13)
Trump’s tactics—bombing—won’t work. Knowledgeable experts believe that a key Iranian nuclear facility is Pickaxe Mountain, where some of its uranium may be stored. That facility is so far below the ground that even America’s 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs can’t reach its inner chamber.
Trump talks about “going in” and taking the nuclear material out. But a ground operation to retrieve the material or destroy the facility would entail tremendous risk to those attempting it while providing, at best, an uncertain outcome.
The threat of a nuclear Iran remains.
Score: Iran 3, Trump 0
False Declarations of Victory That Backfire
Trump’s bluster isn’t working with Iranian leaders. His threats to commit war crimes dominate news cycles, but they merely reveal to Iran Trump’s desperation to extricate himself from the mess he created. As a negotiating strategy, it’s counterproductive.
Trump’s persistent boasts about tactical victories against Iran’ s military ignore the fundamental strategic fact that Trump has lost the Iran war. If a deal emerges from discussions between Iran’s experienced negotiators and Trump’s collection of amateurs, America and the world will pay a big price for a long time.
David Vine
Faced with the threat of more war
in Iran and elsewhere, Congress must do everything in its power to stop Trump.
One tool Congress hasn’t used is its power to immediately cut off money for
wars.
As a candidate for president,
Donald Trump infamously promised to end endless wars and be the president of
peace. In office, President Trump has launched illegal regime change wars in
Iran and Venezuela; bombed at least five other countries; threatened war
against Cuba, Greenland, Mexico, Panama, and Colombia; and supported Israel’s
genocide in Gaza and war in Lebanon.Despite a two-week ceasefire and diplomatic negotiations with Iran, Trump has deployed thousands of additional troops to the Middle East, while “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has made renewed threats to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure, widely considered a war crime. For the next fiscal year, Trump has requested the largest military budget in US history, $1.5 trillion. He has also indicated he will ask for up to $200 billion more to fund the war in Iran. By all indications, Trump looks likely to return to war, if not in Iran, somewhere else.
Trump’s embrace of endless wars already has killed and injured tens of thousands, displaced millions, squandered tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, driven up prices on gas and other necessities, created a global economic crisis, and risked wider catastrophe and World War III. And don’t forget Trump’s genocidal threats to “wipe out” Iranian civilization, implying a potential nuclear attack.
Faced with the threat of more endless war in Iran and beyond, Congress must do everything in its power to stop Trump. One tool Congress hasn’t used is its power to immediately cut off money for wars in Iran and beyond. With constitutional authority over government spending, Congress can use its rescission power—that is, the power to rescind, or take back, money previously appropriated to government agencies. Specifically, Congress should rescind around one-third of this year’s discretionary budgets for the “Department of War” and Department of Energy, where nuclear weapons spending is hidden, while avoiding cuts that would harm military personnel and their families.
Cutting $350 billion in discretionary spending from the over $1 trillion war budgets would actually help protect the troops by making it harder, if not impossible, for Trump to deploy them into harm’s way to fight his wars. While a $350 billion cut may sound daunting, it would leave the country with a total military budget far larger than that of China and Russia combined and allow the military to focus on defending the country rather than squandering billions on endless wars.
While only two Republican Congress members have voted to stop Trump’s war in Iran, Democrats should advance a rescissions bill to continue to apply pressure to end the war in Iran and show they won’t fund another day of endless war. While a rescissions bill is unlikely to pass now, we may soon see more Republicans defecting from Trump’s sinking presidency and increasingly unhinged behavior. While a rescissions bill of this sort may break with congressional precedent, the future of the country and the world is at stake. Extraordinary threats demand extraordinary measures.
Cutting the War Budget Now
Given what we’ve seen from Trump, how can he be trusted to continue to control a military budget that already exceeds $1 trillion? Doing so is to almost literally leave loaded guns in the hands of an increasingly erratic and dangerous man.
The danger Trump poses underlines the desperate need to get Trump out of office as quickly as possible through impeachment or the 25th Amendment. Amid these efforts and continued attempts to pass Iran War Powers Resolutions to prevent Trump from waging war without congressional approval, Congress should help protect the country and the world by removing the funds available to Trump to make more war.
Allowing Donald Trump to continue to control the entirety of this year’s Pentagon budget—let alone a larger one next year—risks his not only continuing his immoral, illegal war in Iran but also his likely launching new wars, including, for example, in Cuba and most frightening of all with China.
Congress has the power to take back money it’s previously appropriated to the Pentagon just as it has passed thousands of rescissions bills to take back all kinds of funding it previously approved.
There are at least three forms a rescissions bill could take. Under each, the bill won’t take pay or services from military personnel or their family members. It will instead take money from weapons makers and others profiting off war and budgets that make the military an offensive, endless war fighting force. A rescissions bill could rescind money for war and:
- Return the money to citizens in the form of $600 to $1,200 stimulus checks (or a “peace dividend”) and some lowering of the national debt, as military budget expert Stephen Semler has proposed. As Semler says, this proposal could appeal to people across the political spectrum given the longstanding affordability crisis, which has been worsened by the rising price of gas and other necessities thanks to Trump’s new war.
- Reappropriate—that is, redirect—the funds as a peace dividend to defend people’s daily lives by improving and expanding access to things like Medicare and Medicaid, free school lunches and other food assistance, childcare, affordable housing, and other critical infrastructure.
- Return the money to the US Treasury to reduce the near $40 trillion national debt.
Is It Realistic?
A rescissions bill is unlikely to pass in today’s Congress. To now, only two Republicans have voted for War Powers Resolutions to stop the war in Iran. However, the resolutions failed by just a few votes given the tiny Republican majority in Congress. And we don’t know what Congress will look like in one month or three, when more Republicans may abandon Trump.
Democrats and others shouldn’t be afraid of the tired shibboleth that military spending is about “supporting the troops”—it is increasingly obvious that increasingly large military budgets have made it easier to wage offensive, catastrophic wars of choice that have put troops in harm’s way, causing tens of thousands of troop deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries, in addition to millions more dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, and far beyond.
Even if a rescissions bill can’t pass now, it can be another way to pressure the administration to end the US-Israeli war in Iran and Lebanon. Along with war powers resolutions, a rescissions bill is another way to demonstrate continuing opposition to this and other endless wars. It’s a way to keep the media focused on a war that’s been all too distant from many people’s lives in the US. It’s a way to do everything humanly possible to stop wars that have already killed and injured tens of thousands and that could exceed the catastrophe of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq if they continue.
A rescissions bill will also allow constituents and journalists to ask Congress members and midterm candidates, “Do you want to fund more endless war or do you think Congress should take money back from the Pentagon to prevent more war and fund things we need? Do you think we can trust Trump with the current Pentagon budget or not? Do you think we can trust that Trump won’t use the out-of-control military budget to restart the war with Iran and start new wars, most terrifyingly a potential nuclear war with China?”
A rescissions bill also gives politicians an opportunity to vote “yes” to cut the Pentagon budget; “yes” to a peace dividend; “yes” to using taxpayer money to actually defend the country and improve national security; “yes” to a rational, realistic, defense-focused military budget rather than a military budget designed for offensive wars.
While Trump has trashed his promise to “stop wars” not start them, Congress has the power to pass a rescissions bill that would protect the country and the world from more endless war while transforming the US military into the defensive force it should be.
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