Wednesday, March 18, 2026
US spending on first week of Iran war raises stark questions about priorities
US spending on first week of Iran war raises stark questions about priorities
The US spent $11.3bn on just the first week of its military assault on Iran. This huge expenditure dwarves the annual budgets of many of the public health and scientific agencies the Trump administration has sought to cut, raising stark questions about the country’s priorities.
In the six days that followed the US and Israel’s joint attack on Iran on 28 February, $11.3bn was spent on American taxpayer-funded bombs that hit the country and caused hundreds of deaths, the Pentagon has told lawmakers. This figure does not capture the full cost of the conflict, such as deployment of forces, and will now be far higher given the ongoing nature of the war.
But even the limited snapshot of the financial cost of the war has underscored the enormous disparity between the amount spent by the US on its military compared with the budgets of agencies tasked to keep Americans’ air clean, help find new cures for cancer and devise new scientific innovations.
The cost of the first week of the Iran war would be more than enough to fully fund the Environmental Protection Agency this year (at $8.8bn), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ($9.2bn) or the National Cancer Institute ($7.4bn). The $11.3bn is also more than the total amount allocated this year for federal scientific research funding, via the National Science Foundation.
“This just shows a disturbing prioritization of militarism over the health and welfare of the American public,” said Adam Gaffney, a professor at Harvard Medical School who has studied the health impacts of the administration’s policies.
“With that money, we could be doubling public health expenditures or doubling environmental protections ensuring that Americans have clean air and water. We could bring healthcare to millions of Americans. Instead, we are putting that money into a war of choice.”
The Trump administration has sought to shrink the budgets of the US’s public health and science agencies even further, proposing drastic reductions of more than 50% to the budgets of the EPA and the NSF this year.
Congress, which is tasked by the US constitution to oversee public spending as well as declarations of war, has balked at the White House’s planned cuts, however, passing spending bills this year with roughly similar expenditures for these agencies as previous budget levels.
Some Democrats have said that the Department of Defense, which has an annual budget of more than $900bn, has enough money even with the huge outlay in Iran. “The military has all the funding it needs for this conflict,” Adam Schiff said on NBC on Sunday.
“All of these billions, this $11bn within just the first few days, is money that could’ve gone into new hospitals and into new schools, into healthcare for people, for meeting the needs of the American people.”
Last year, the administration started a purge of what it deemed wasteful spending, an effort spearheaded by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge). This involved the firing of swaths of agency staff and scientists, the tearing-up of thousands of research grants funding work ranging from clean energy development to cancer cures and the blacklisting of initiatives deemed to be ideologically discordant with Trump’s worldview.
“There will be zero tolerance of any waste and abuse,” Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the EPA said last year as he announced the end of what he called “irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left, activist groups” via various grants.
Scientists have warned that this agenda will worsen problems such as pollution, imperil the US’s reputation as a scientific leader and choke off new breakthroughs that can aid the public and lead to lucrative commercialization. Some researchers have already fled the US, raising alarm over a “brain drain” of scientific talent.
“The Trump administration’s broadside against the American research enterprise has been deeply disturbing,” said Gaffney.
“It’s not just funding cuts, it’s the politicization of science, the grants no longer funded and the broader attack on science and evidence, such as RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine theories. This turn towards a dark-ages mentality by this administration is very concerning.”
The administration is reorienting scientific funding on a set of major priorities and seeking “a smaller number of big ‘moonshot’ approaches” such as a breakthrough in fusion energy, said Arthur Daemmrich, director of the Arizona State University consortium for science, policy and outcomes.
Trump has also signed an order for the US to return to the moon and then on to Mars. This endeavor is assigned to Nasa, an agency that Congress handed a $24.4bn budget for this year – an amount equal to about two weeks’ of waging war on Iran.
“Concerns about the military crowding out other research or the general orientation of US science have been raised repeatedly since the 1920s,” said Daemmrich. “For many decades, the US pursued both military-based research and development and civilian, spread across a dozen agencies and with little coordination.”
The weight of funding shifted further towards the military in the wake of the second world war, Daemmrich said, with the Pentagon’s budget now routinely one of the largest expenditures, along with social security, in overall US government spending.
The amount spent on the Iran war has been particularly eye-catching to researchers who have seen their own federal funding cut. Last year, Tammie Visintainer, an associate professor of science education at San José State University, saw two NSF grants, together worth about $500,000, deleted by the administration in its effort to stamp out any funded research with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) connotations.
This “extremely jarring” decision ended four years of work to bolster student participation rates in Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and to measure the urban heat island effect in cities, Visintainer said. The latter project was gathering temperature data that would ultimately help cities adapt to rising temperatures spurred by the climate crisis.
“Budgets are values, and this war is just more evidence that the cuts were never about the money,” Visintainer said. “If you wanted to save money, the military would be the first place to look. This was really about undermining science and anything that doesn’t support their big donors and big oil.”
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” she added. “I mean, one-hundredth of a Tomahawk missile could pay for all of these agencies. It could’ve funded a lot of research. Instead, this money is used to kill Iranian schoolgirls.”
The White House was contacted for comment."
Opinion | The Last Thing Trump Wants to Do Is Save America - The New York Times
This Is What the President Is Fixated on Right Now?
"A president who cares about a particular policy or piece of legislation is typically a president who can speak fluently on the subject.
By that measure, the war in Iran does not seem to be much of a priority for President Trump. Since he began the conflict, he has struggled to explain the nation’s war aims, much less give a coherent account of his decision to launch the attack or how he might bring the war to an end.
Nor do his immigration policies appear to meet that standard. He hardly speaks about them other than to praise the actions of ICE or the Department of Homeland Security or to offer some perfunctory justification for his brutal treatment of immigrants, legal and undocumented alike.
One thing he is fixated on, however, is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — a broad set of new voting restrictions.
As the president sees it, and as the name would have you believe, the SAVE Act is meant to secure American elections against corruption and malfeasance. “America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website this month. “We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer.”
But to this president, as we should know by now, a “rigged” election is one that he lost or did not win to his satisfaction. To Trump, the 2016 presidential election, in which he won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, was “rigged.” So was 2020, where he lost outright and then led his supporters in a failed but destructive effort to “stop the steal.” And had Trump lost the 2024 presidential election, we can be certain he would have denounced that one as rigged as well.
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For reasons of both ego and ideology, Trump does not believe that he can legitimately lose an election. He is, to his mind, the living embodiment of the nation. If he doesn’t win, then the system must be broken. In that sense, the SAVE Act is far less about American elections as they exist than it is about the president’s vision of American society. The basic premise of Trumpism is that the people of the United States are not the collected citizens of the United States, naturalized and natural born, but a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump.
The SAVE Act is an attempt to make that distinction a political reality by removing as many mere Americans from the voting pool as possible and elevating the “true” people of the United States — who just so happen to support Trump and the Republican Party — as the only legitimate players in American political life. The goal, then, is to nationalize something akin to what many Americans experienced in the Jim Crow South: a one-party state, backed by the threat of violence, where the law ensures that most people cannot hope for meaningful political representation.
Supporters of the bill might say that this is ridiculous — that the SAVE Act is nothing more than an attempt to impose a reasonable requirement for identification on anyone who hopes to vote. “We have to show ID for almost everything that we do here in America,” Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican of Tennessee, said in a Fox News interview on Sunday. “I do not understand why exercising one of the most precious rights as an American is not one of those issues that Democrats can support.”
Other Republicans, including the president, say that we need this law to stem the tide of a supposed flood of noncitizen voting. “This will be one of the most important votes that members of this chamber will ever take in their entire careers,” Speaker Mike Johnson said of a vote on a version of the SAVE Act two years ago. “Should Americans and Americans alone determine the outcome of American elections? Or should we allow foreigners and illegal immigrants to decide who sits in the White House and in the people’s House and in the Senate?”
Both noncitizen voting and in-person voter fraud are virtually nonexistent. They simply do not happen. Election officials aren’t flying blind, either; every state that requires voter registration requires some identification to register, and 36 states have explicit voter ID laws. No matter where you vote in the United States, you must at some point prove your residence and identity.
The SAVE Act would go beyond simple voter ID to impose a national citizenship requirement. To register to vote, you would have to prove that you are an American citizen. And the only acceptable documents under the law are a passport, a Real ID that verifies citizenship, a valid military or tribal ID or a U.S. birth certificate.
You do not need a sharp mind to see the problems here. Roughly half of Americans do not have a passport, and millions of people, especially older Americans, lack easy access to their birth certificates. Overall, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, an estimated 9 percent of eligible voters, or 21.3 million Americans, do not have ready access to documents that could prove their citizenship.
It’s not as if a passport is free, either. The minimum cost to obtain a passport is $165, plus the time needed to submit the application, which must be done at an official location. Neither is a birth certificate, which costs money as well. And of course, you need a birth certificate to obtain a passport. Consider, too, the millions of American women who, upon marriage, took their husband’s last name and may need to get a new birth certificate to register to vote.
It gets worse.
The SAVE Act requires prospective voters to register in person, a serious obstacle for the tens of millions of Americans who are infirm or disabled, rely on public transportation or live in rural areas, far from a government office. It requires states to submit their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security to run through its much-criticized citizenship verification program and mandates that states purge those rolls every 30 days, whether or not there is an election on the horizon. If you happen to move and fail to immediately update your address, you could be forced to go through a cumbersome process to reregister — assuming you’ve been notified of your lapsed registration.
The SAVE Act effectively bans universal mail voting — a bête noire of the president — and places a strict ID requirement on voting itself. And all of this would be carried out and interpreted by a federal government that, in the hands of Trump and other like-minded Republicans, is a tool of partisan warfare. The same Trump State Department that trawls the social media activity of Americans for evidence of wrong-think might, under this law, refuse passports to those it suspects of Democratic sympathies. Similarly, a Trump Justice Department might openly push states to remove specific people from their voting pools on the basis of speech or perceived political affiliation.
All of this, in a literal sense, recapitulates the electoral mechanisms of Jim Crow, whose hurdles, obstacles and restrictions relied on both blunt force and bureaucratic discretion to exclude Black Americans (and a large number of white ones as well) from the pool of voters. For a literacy test, a Jim Crow registrar might ask a white would-be voter to recite the ABCs. She might ask a Black would-be voter, by contrast, to recite the Constitution from memory. She might even administer a test that, by design, can’t be passed, meant to keep even the most determined Black person from the ballot box.
Given the number of new requirements Americans would be forced to meet, the SAVE Act might allow for the kind of discretion that can easily abet voter suppression. If nothing else, by forcing Americans to obtain proof of citizenship if they hope to vote, it all but requires them to pay a poll tax — something outlawed by the 24th Amendment to the Constitution. And while it is true that Congress has the constitutional authority to establish national voting rules, it is also the case that through the 12th, 14th, 15th, 19th and 26th Amendments, the Constitution presumes something like an affirmative right to vote for the presidency and other federal offices. This makes the SAVE Act, which would intentionally disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans, not just unconstitutional in its provisions but anti-constitutional in its fundamental contempt for popular sovereignty and rule by the governed.
Here again, a supporter of the law might cry foul. But you need only read what the president says about the proposal. Speaking to congressional Republicans, Trump said that the law would “guarantee the midterms” for the Republican Party.
Now, if we step back and look at the composition of the American electorate, the reality is that the SAVE Act might work against the Republican Party. Married women, especially those who have taken their husband’s last name, are a Republican-leaning group. So are Americans without passports, who tend not to have college degrees. And those Americans most likely to lack the personal or civic resources to obtain documentation on short notice are the low-propensity voters that put Trump over the top in 2016 and 2024 — the same voters that Republicans need in November. Republican voters have also made great use of mail-in voting in the states where it is available.
Far from neutering the Democratic Party, the SAVE Act might improve its ability to win big in this year’s midterms as a result of education polarization and a stark difference in enthusiasm between the two parties.
But Trump and his allies think otherwise, and intent matters. The point of the SAVE Act, for them, is to use a ginned-up panic over noncitizen voting to disenfranchise the tens of millions of Americans who oppose the president and who have, as a result, been placed outside the political community. The SAVE Act embodies Trump and the Republican Party’s astonishing contempt for the idea that a fair election is one in which you can vote without being hassled by the state.
This week, Senate Republicans intend to put the bill up for debate, and odds are good that it will fall to a Democratic filibuster. “We are ready to be here all day, all night, as long as it takes to ensure the powers of voter suppression do not win the day,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, as Republicans opened debate on the proposal. But Americans wondering what to think about the SAVE Act should consider it a direct attack on their fundamental right to vote, to choose their leaders free of coercion and interference. It is a bill that imagines the American people as little more than subjects to a president who playacts as a king.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va."
Why This Jump in Gas Prices Feels Different - The New York Times
Why This Jump in Gas Prices Feels Different
"A state-by-state look at the increase and how it could affect you.
Since the start of the war in Iran, the average price of gas in the United States has climbed by nearly a dollar.
In mid-February, gas cost around $2.90 per gallon. By mid-March, it was up to $3.70, according to the Energy Information Administration.
It’s the second-largest four-week increase in at least 30 years — bigger than the one at the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, or the ones associated with the post-recession surge of 2009 and the OPEC production cuts in 1999.
The only bigger jump came after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when gas supply fell significantly.
Largest four-week changes in gas prices since 1990
| Date | Change | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sept. 5, 2005 | +30% |
| 2 | March 16, 2026 | +27% |
| 3 | March 14, 2022 | +24% |
| 4 | June 1, 2009 | +21% |
| 5 | April 5, 1999 | +21% |
The typical U.S. driver travels around 1,000 miles each month. Depending on the car, those higher prices translate to as much as $50 more a month.
Cost to drive 1,000 miles in a …
| Before | After | change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hybrid (52 m.p.g.) | $56 | $72 | +$16 |
| Average car (25 m.p.g.) | $117 | $149 | +$32 |
| Truck (17 m.p.g.) | $172 | $219 | +$47 |
No state has been spared. Average prices are up by more than 50 cents per gallon everywhere, and by more than a dollar in New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, according to the AAA motor club.
Price of a gallon of gas in …
| State | Before | After | change |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Mexico | $2.61 | $3.79 | +$1.18 |
| Arizona | $3.16 | $4.33 | +$1.17 |
| Colorado | $2.76 | $3.82 | +$1.06 |
| Nevada | $3.64 | $4.59 | +$0.95 |
| California | $4.59 | $5.53 | +$0.94 |
Crude oil prices drive gas prices, and oil has spiked since the start of the war because of supply disruptions: Major oil exporting countries in the Persian Gulf can’t get their product through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical and narrow waterway along Iran’s southern coast.
Prices have continued to rise despite the release of strategic oil reserves. The increases are having the biggest effect on lower-income households, who spend a larger share of their earnings on gasoline than higher-income Americans.
But if you look at the history of gas prices, this month’s spike appears a little smaller.
Americans are more insulated from oil shocks today than decades ago. Petroleum makes up a tiny share of electricity generation (less than 1 percent, down from 11 percent in 1980). Oil prices hit consumers on the road most of all, but even there, less so: The country’s cars are more efficient, on average, and a growing share of Americans are driving electric vehicles.
Still, there are plenty of old and less efficient cars on the road. And those owners will face these prices at the pump over and over — prices that might go higher still.""
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