Senators from both parties are moving to freeze Pete Hegseth's travel funds until the Pentagon hands over long-overdue investigations into civilian deaths — including the bombing of an Iranian elementary school that killed more than 165 people — as Congress belatedly asks the question working Americans have demanded since day one: what did we get from another Middle East war?
The push comes as lawmakers confront the aftermath of President Trump's nearly four-month conflict with Iran — a war Congress never authorized and repeatedly failed to stop. The Senate voted nine times on war powers resolutions. Nine times it failed to reach a majority. The House finally passed one last month after a handful of Republicans broke ranks. By then, the bombs had already fallen.
At the center of the accountability fight is the Feb. 28 U.S. missile strike on a school in Minab, adjacent to a Revolutionary Guard base. More than 165 people were killed, many of them children. Officials preliminarily acknowledged the U.S. carried out the strike based on outdated intelligence, according to Arkansas Online. If confirmed, it would rank among the deadliest civilian casualty events caused by American military operations in two decades. The Pentagon completed its investigation last month but still hasn't delivered it to the Hill.
The annual defense authorization bill filed this week would restrict more than 75% of the defense secretary's travel funds until Hegseth submits "unredacted civilian harm investigations" with "all relevant supporting documents." Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the provision "forces the Secretary to be more accountable to Congress and will prevent many errors of the past from being repeated in the future."
Lawmakers are also demanding unedited video of U.S. strikes on boats near Venezuela — a monthslong campaign that has killed at least 211 people — and investigations into April 2025 strikes in Yemen, including one on a port that left at least 70 dead and another on a Sanaa neighborhood that killed four. In at least one Venezuela case, survivors were killed in follow-on strikes, which experts say may violate military law.
Meanwhile, the deal Trump struck to end the Iran war has raised its own concerns. A tentative provision would create a $300 billion fund for "reconstruction and economic development" of Iran — a number that caught the attention of Republicans who once denounced the Obama-era cash payments to Tehran as a fraction of that amount. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., put it plainly: "The only concerns I have are the money and the conditions. If we send a trainload, a shipload, it's gonna age as well as that."
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., didn't mince words about the war itself: "Pathetic. Failure. Inevitable conclusion of a combination of never making the case to the American people, flawed strategic vision, lack of grasp of the regional dynamics."
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution framed the story around Congress wrestling with whether the war was "worth it." Arkansas Online focused on the travel-fund mechanism to force Hegseth's compliance. What neither emphasized is the core failure: both parties let an unauthorized war run for months, and now both are scrambling for accountability after the bodies are counted and the billions are spent. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
Congress never authorized this war. It couldn't stop it. Now it's withholding travel money from the defense secretary to get answers about dead children. The question isn't just whether it was worth it — it's who answers for it, and whether anyone in this town ever will.
