Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO), a member of the House Armed Services Committee and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, announced Tuesday that he is forcing a new congressional vote to end President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, citing a fresh nonpartisan estimate that the six-month-old conflict has already cost American taxpayers nearly $38 billion. Crow’s push comes hours after the Congressional Budget Office released its first formal accounting of the war’s price tag, warning that the fighting is also driving up inflation and eating into the country’s stockpile of missile interceptors.
Crow laid out his position in a post on X published Tuesday at 3:47 p.m. His full statement read:
“The Iran war has cost taxpayers at least $38 billion.
That’s money being spent on new forever wars in the Middle East—instead of roads, schools, and cheaper healthcare here at home.
I’m forcing another vote today in Congress to end this reckless conflict.”
The congressman’s post came in direct response to a Congressional Budget Office report published Tuesday, which found that the war — launched by the United States and Israel in February and originally expected to last only a few weeks — had directly cost $38.1 billion through August 1 and continues to run up bills of roughly $2 billion to $3 billion every month. The nonpartisan budget office cautioned that costs could climb further during periods of intensified fighting.
More than half of that total, $21.7 billion, has gone toward replacing munitions, including $13.1 billion in missile-defense interceptors alone. The CBO estimated the U.S. has burned through between half and two-thirds of its inventory of Patriot, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors since the war began, with rebuilding those stockpiles projected to take five years or longer.
A Pentagon Watchdog Reached Similar Conclusions
The CBO’s findings echoed a separate assessment released a day earlier by the Pentagon’s inspector general, which also flagged “strategic inventory shortfalls” and said the war had pushed the Pentagon’s weapons-buying arm to accelerate procurement and stockpile critical materials to respond to future contingencies. U.S. Central Command told the inspector general that Iranian strikes had damaged or destroyed hundreds of structures at American bases across Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan, and that dozens of U.S. aircraft had been destroyed or damaged during the operation.
The CBO said its own $38.1 billion estimate carries “considerable uncertainty” because the Pentagon did not respond to its requests for information, forcing analysts to rely on government databases and public reporting instead. That lack of cooperation also kept the agency from estimating the cost of repairing or rebuilding the damaged U.S. bases in the region.
White House and Pentagon Push Back on Munitions Shortage Claims
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump have both disputed reports of munitions shortages. Trump said in a Monday social media post that the U.S. is producing and delivering weapons at record levels, two weeks after claiming the country had “virtually unlimited” amounts of munitions. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement that “President Trump took decisive action to ensure that Iran could never harm our homeland, our troops, or our allies again,” adding that “the United States military has more than enough munitions, ammo, and stockpiles to serve all of the commander-in-chief’s strategic goals and beyond.” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell echoed that position, stating “claims of U.S. munition shortages are false” and that the department has “already executed successful operations while maintaining a deep, ready arsenal.”
Beyond the direct military costs, the CBO projected the war will add roughly half a percentage point to inflation in the first quarter of 2027, driven largely by higher energy prices tied to supply disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. The agency also found that the resulting inflation has pushed up borrowing costs, raising short-term interest rates by an estimated 0.2 percentage points compared with its prewar forecast. On Monday, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note edged past 5% for the first time since 2007.
Economists Warn of Longer-Term Fallout
Claudia Sahm, chief economist at New Century Advisors, said higher diesel, shipping and other energy costs are working their way through business supply chains, though it can take roughly a year for those pressures to fully surface. “It’s not a matter of whether energy is creating cost in the economy or not. It’s just who’s going to be the one at the end that really foots the bill,” Sahm said. Jessica Riedl, an economist with the Brookings Institution, said ahead of the report’s release that she expected the CBO to project slower growth, higher inflation and higher interest rates, all of which could make it harder for businesses to invest, families to buy homes, and the federal government to finance its debt.
Trump has rejected the idea that the Iran war is chiefly to blame for rising diesel prices, writing in a Monday social media post that “the World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/Ukraine War, not Iran.” Oil prices have nonetheless surged following recent attacks on oil facilities and shipping, with a barrel topping $100 this month; the CBO expects oil prices to run 41% higher this year than it had forecast before the war began in February.
Report Lands Amid a Stalled Spending Fight on Capitol Hill
The CBO’s findings arrive as lawmakers debate a near-$90 billion supplemental spending package, which includes a Trump administration request for as much as $70 billion in emergency military funding tied to the war. The CBO noted that only $42.3 billion of the Pentagon’s portion of that request appears directly related to the conflict, and flagged that the package includes $12.1 billion in classified programs — a sum the agency said is large compared with similar requests during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In July, House Republicans pushed through a budget resolution allocating $73 billion to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, largely for the Iran war, but the measure has stalled in the Senate for lack of votes. Riedl said the CBO’s warning “would probably give more members cold feet when it comes to policies that increase deficits,” adding that “both the 40% defense hike and the tax rebates both face a pretty uphill battle on the Hill even before the CBO fires a warning shot about a weakening global economy.”
Crow’s Long Campaign Against the War
Tuesday’s push is the latest in a string of War Powers Resolutions Crow has introduced or backed since the war began. He first condemned the operation on February 28, the day it launched, saying Trump was “plunging us into another war in the Middle East” with “no clear end game, no authorization from Congress, and little support from Americans.”
In May, Crow introduced a War Powers Resolution alongside Congressman Seth Moulton (D-MA), declaring that “Congress must end President Trump’s illegal war of choice with Iran. His war has cost the lives of U.S. servicemembers, raised prices for Americans at home, damaged our alliances, and made us less safe.” That effort failed in the House in April, prompting Crow to call the outcome “a disgrace,” saying “Americans are struggling to get by, yet House Republicans and this Administration are more focused on continuing a war no one wants than on making their lives better for working people.”
Crow tried again in June, joining Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) on a resolution that ultimately passed the House 215-208. After that vote, Crow said, “The President’s war with Iran has been an unmitigated disaster. 13 servicemembers lost their lives, billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent, and Americans are seeing their everyday costs rise higher and higher. People are fed up with endless conflict in the Middle East. With today’s bipartisan vote, Congress is finally doing what it should have done months ago.”
A Veteran’s Case Against “Forever War”
Crow, a former Army Ranger and paratrooper who deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, has repeatedly framed his opposition to the war in terms of who bears its costs. Speaking on the House floor ahead of an earlier vote, he said, “Working class Americans, like the kids that I grew up with, the kids that I deployed with, fought with, suffered with, they’re the ones that have to do the fighting, and the dying, and the paying for these conflicts. They see that the burden of these wars fall on them, while the elites and the rich and the powerful in this country get richer, and more powerful, and more comfortable.”
Report Lands Weeks Before Midterms
Although the CBO is Congress’s nonpartisan fiscal analysis arm, Tuesday’s report was requested by congressional Democrats and arrives just weeks before November’s midterm elections, as Democrats seek to make gas prices and other economic fallout from the war a central line of attack against Republicans. Hegseth, under questioning from lawmakers last month, had put the war’s cost at $37.5 billion — an $8.5 billion jump from the figure he gave in May, just before Trump negotiated a temporary ceasefire with Iran.
Whether Tuesday’s vote succeeds where April’s failed and June’s passed remains to be seen, but Crow’s post makes clear he intends to keep tying the war’s mounting price tag directly to kitchen-table costs back home — a message he has repeated in nearly every statement on the conflict since it began seven months ago.