U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) marked six months since the start of the war with Iran on Friday with a pointed social media post accusing the Trump administration of pursuing a conflict with “no strategy and no end in sight,” citing rising costs, extended troop deployments and the deaths of 18 American service members since fighting began on February 28.
Schiff’s post, published to X at 10:20 a.m. on August 28, 2026, read in full:
“Today marks six months of the Iran War.
Six months with no strategy and no end in sight.
Six months of higher costs across the board.
Six months of our servicemembers being away from their families.
Six months and 18 service members killed.
We must end this war and bring our troops home.”
The post came in direct response to an ABC News report published the same day marking the six-month milestone, which noted that President Trump had originally predicted the war would last four to five weeks when the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28. Instead, the conflict has expanded to involve several Gulf states, drawn the U.S. military into a prolonged blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, according to the report.
A Six-Month Escalation With No Resolution
The war began on February 28 when U.S. and Israeli forces launched strikes targeting Iranian leadership and military infrastructure, which Trump described at the time as necessary to eliminate “imminent threats from the Iranian regime,” including its nuclear ambitions. Iran retaliated with strikes on American bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq on a scale the ABC News report characterized as unseen since the Vietnam War, and later shut down commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting one of the world’s most critical trade routes. U.S. Central Command has since struck more than 13,000 Iranian targets, including military headquarters, naval vessels, air defense systems and drone launch sites.
Schiff responded to the war’s opening hours with a statement warning that Trump was “drawing our country into yet another foreign war that Americans don’t want and Congress has not authorized,” and noted the administration had claimed just eight months earlier, following Operation Midnight Hammer, that Iran’s nuclear program had already been “obliterated.” He announced he had joined Senators Tim Kaine, Rand Paul and Chuck Schumer in introducing a War Powers Resolution to block further unauthorized military action.
Repeated War Powers Fights
Schiff has used the War Powers Resolution process repeatedly over the six-month conflict to challenge the legality of the administration’s actions. On the Senate floor in early March, with six American service members already dead, Schiff urged colleagues to reassert congressional authority, telling the chamber the deployment’s scale and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz made clear “this is war, in a real sense, in a constitutional sense,” and pressed the president to justify the human and financial cost directly to Congress.
In May, after the Trump administration notified Congress that the war had been “terminated” — a notification that came only after Schiff forced a vote on his War Powers Resolution as the 60-day statutory clock expired — Schiff issued a statement calling the move legally meaningless. He argued the administration remained in violation of the War Powers Act since the Navy continued blockading Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, writing that the president “has bombed Iran,” “blockaded their ports and international waterways,” and “threatened annihilation of an entire civilization.”
The Islamabad MOU and Its Collapse
By mid-June, after months of negotiations that included the Islamabad talks in April, the U.S. and Iran signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding intended as a pathway to a comprehensive nuclear agreement. When the Senate subsequently passed a House-approved War Powers Resolution 50-48 to formally end the conflict, Schiff said the administration had “pursued this illegal war without making the case to Congress or the American people,” pointing to regional chaos, “skyrocketing gas and grocery costs,” and the deaths of 13 service members at that point in the war. He added that the administration had since “capitulated with a complete giveaway to Iran that leaves our national security far worse than when the war began.”
The ceasefire did not hold. According to the ABC News report, both sides accused each other of violating the MOU within a week of its signing, and Trump formally declared it dead just 22 days after it took effect. Iran resumed firing on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and U.S. forces launched renewed large-scale airstrikes. In response, Schiff filed another War Powers Resolution in July, arguing that “the events of the last week prove why Congress must reassert its war powers authority,” and noting the country had gone “from a bad U.S.-Iran deal to more strikes, another blockade, and added turmoil that will only drive prices higher.”
The Toll in Lives and Dollars
The human cost of the war has climbed steadily since Schiff’s March floor remarks, when six service members had died. By July, that figure had risen to 14 killed and more than 600 wounded, according to Pentagon figures cited in regional reporting; Schiff’s Friday post put the total at 18 killed as the war reaches its half-year mark.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers this summer that the war’s cost to taxpayers had reached an estimated $37.5 billion, a figure Schiff cited in July while arguing that the administration had failed to justify the conflict to the public. “If [Trump] doesn’t make the case to the American people and to Congress, then the war is going to lack support, and this war lacks support,” Schiff said at the time, according to a Fox 5 San Diego report. He also noted that Iran had “always had the capability, in theory, to close the strait,” and that “now it has demonstrated that it can effectively do it.”
The Pentagon has since requested an additional $67.1 billion in war-related spending for the current fiscal year, on top of a record $1.5 trillion defense budget request the White House submitted to Congress in April for fiscal year 2027, which included a 42% increase in military spending.
Scrutiny of the USS Abraham Lincoln Deployment
In the weeks leading up to the six-month anniversary, Schiff’s criticism of the war’s conduct expanded beyond War Powers votes to the welfare of deployed troops. Following reports from Military Times and Stars and Stripes that sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln — deployed more than eight months without a port visit — were experiencing mental health crises, including attempts to go overboard, Schiff joined fellow California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla and House members representing the carrier’s San Diego home port in requesting a Pentagon inspector general investigation. Their letter argued that “the duration and combat conditions of this extraordinary deployment warrant a review of how the Navy’s risk assessment and contingency planning processes were undertaken.”
That same week, Trump threatened in a Fox News interview to take direct military action against Oman if it interfered with U.S. efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, prompting Senator Tim Kaine to announce a new War Powers Resolution aimed specifically at blocking action against the longtime U.S. ally. Senate Armed Services Committee Democrats separately pressed Hegseth for written answers on shipboard conditions aboard the Lincoln, writing that “our sailors and Marines signed up to serve and to be treated with respect” and “did not sign up to be kept at sea indefinitely.”
Public Opinion Has Soured
Schiff’s characterization of a war without public support is borne out in recent polling. A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted in late August found that just 31% of Americans approve of U.S. military strikes against Iran, down from 37% in March, with 90% of Democrats and 67% of independents disapproving of the military action. Republican support for the war has also eroded, falling from 77% in March to 69% in August. The same poll found only 25% of Americans approved of Trump’s overall handling of the Iran conflict, while his general approval rating fell to 33% — tying a record low across both of his terms in Reuters/Ipsos polling.
Even House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, acknowledged in late July that the administration has “got to wrap it up” on Iran, telling reporters that ending the war before the November midterms would be “helpful” to the party’s political prospects.
No Clear Path to a Resolution
Despite Trump’s early prediction that the war would last four to five weeks, the president said as recently as this week that he is in “no rush” to end it, telling Axios that the administration is “low-keying it” as strategy shifts back toward economic pressure rather than large-scale strikes, which have not occurred in nearly a month. The administration has threatened sweeping sanctions on any country doing business with Iran, an approach Trump has compared to an “economic D-Day,” though Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has offered a “cure period” without setting firm deadlines or naming China, Iran’s largest trading partner, directly.
As of this week, Trump has ruled out further negotiations for the foreseeable future, posting on Truth Social that “there are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” U.S. officials tell ABC News that back-channel contacts between negotiators continue at a limited pace through mediating powers, but that hope for a renewed diplomatic breakthrough — let alone a lasting nuclear agreement — has reached its lowest point since the war began.
Schiff’s Friday statement adds to a six-month record of near-continuous public pressure on the administration over the war’s legality, cost and human toll — a campaign that has yet to produce a definitive end to the conflict as it enters its seventh month with no scheduled negotiations and no announced timeline for withdrawal.