The White House has asked Congress for $87.6bn (£66.5bn), most of it for “urgent needs” connected with the US war on Iran – a request that arrives a day after lawmakers rebuked the military action in a historic vote. The bulk of the funding, $67bn, would go to the Defence Department, including $21bn for munitions, $17.3bn for operational costs and $12.1bn for classified programmes, according to the White House budget office.
The request comes as Washington and Tehran observe a ceasefire, but the Pentagon says it needs to “rebuild stocks” after its military strikes. Yet the proposal faces an uphill battle in Congress, with midterm elections looming and the Iran conflict deeply unpopular with voters. Republicans have already expressed scepticism about a peace plan Trump agreed last week with Iran.
“Trump asks Congress for $87.6bn mostly for Iran war costs amid political backlash and ceasefire.”
Tensions erupted on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, a day after the Senate passed a largely symbolic resolution to restrict Trump’s war powers – the first resolution of its kind to clear Congress instructing a president to end a military action. At a closed-door luncheon with Senate Republicans, Trump complained about the vote and abruptly called off a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill. One of the four Republican senators who voted with Democrats, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, said he and the president had a shouting match. “I stood and said, ‘You have not told the American people what’s going on,’” Cassidy told journalists. “This was supposed to last four weeks, it’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved.”
The war began on 28 February 2026, when US strikes targeted Iran’s leadership, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, several top military commanders, and the son of the supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen since. Iran responded with a barrage of ballistic missiles – 1,471 from the start until 20 April. Of those, 650 were aimed at Israel, killing 27 civilians and one off-duty IDF soldier, while wounding about 3,000. Hundreds more landed in the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, causing property damage.
Before the meeting, Trump had described the war powers vote as “poorly timed and meaningless”, and on social media labelled the four Republican dissenters as “losers”. In the funding request, the White House also included $300m to bolster security at US embassies after some came under attack earlier in the war, plus $11bn for US farmers and $1.4bn to tackle the Ebola outbreak in Central Africa. But the central fight remains over the war itself – a conflict that has now lasted four months, far longer than originally promised, with no clear end in sight.