Sen. Patty Murray of Washington said Congress will not simply hand President Trump unlimited funding to continue the war with Iran, delivering the line at both a Senate hearing and a Democratic leadership press conference within the span of a week.
“I want to make this crystal clear,” Murray wrote on X. “Congress is not an ATM for Trump’s forever wars.”
Murray, Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, first used the phrase during a July 21 hearing on the administration’s $87.6 billion supplemental funding request, according to the committee’s official release on the hearing. “‘Just trust me’ is not a strategy, and it sure isn’t worth $70 billion of taxpayer money,” Murray said. “Congress is not an ATM for Trump’s forever wars. Taxpayers do not want us to rubberstamp a blank check for Trump to drop bombs overseas while healthcare costs are sky high here at home.”
She repeated the phrase eight days later at a Senate Democratic leadership press conference. “Every time Trump says an end to the war he should have never started is around the corner, the bill for his forever war just gets bigger,” Murray said, according to the committee’s official transcript of those remarks. “Sorry, but no. I will not rubberstamp a blank check for Trump to drop bombs overseas while health care costs are sky-high at home.”
Murray has argued the administration’s funding request goes well beyond what the Iran war itself requires. At the July 21 hearing, she noted the Pentagon already holds a combined $1 trillion budget for fiscal year 2026, including $150 billion from the prior year’s reconciliation package, and had yet to spend roughly half of those reconciliation funds even as it sought tens of billions more. She specifically flagged more than $18 billion in munitions funding already requested separately in the fiscal year 2027 budget, along with unrelated items including $800 million for the National Guard’s continued deployment in Washington, D.C., and $900 million for U.S. Southern Command’s boat strikes in the Caribbean, folded into what the administration billed as an emergency war request.
“This administration has tried to sell this as an emergency request, but it may be better understood as an attempt to skirt the normal appropriations process,” Murray told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly. “So, I’ll be blunt: the truth is your request does not make a lot of sense.”
Hegseth defended the request by pointing to what he described as the prior administration’s mismanagement. “Why this kind of spending is needed is because of the gross negligence and neglect of the Biden administration inside our department,” Hegseth told Murray, adding that the department was ahead of schedule on recruiting targets across every military branch.
Murray connected her funding objections to a broader argument about national priorities. “Instead of bankrolling the president’s war or sending ICE $70 billion, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle could work with us to quadruple our investments to cure cancer, or help families afford child care, or help them afford to cool their homes,” Murray said at the July 21 hearing. “These are policy choices.”
At the July 29 press conference, Murray placed the ATM comment within a wider critique of the administration’s overall budget priorities, citing a proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget alongside a 10 percent cut to housing and child care programs. “Republicans might choose war and defense contractors as their top funding priorities,” Murray said, “but Democrats actually care about the families here at home.”
Murray has served as the Senate Appropriations Committee’s top Democrat since 2023 and chaired the panel from 2023 to 2025 while Democrats held the Senate majority.
The Pentagon’s supplemental request remains before the Appropriations Committee, which Murray said would need a continuing resolution extending government funding into December while broader disagreements over the annual defense-to-domestic spending ratio are resolved.
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon has issued a direct public response to Murray’s “ATM” characterization of the funding request.