Sen. Murray TORCHES Hegseth Over Trump's Priorities

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]So, on May 12th, Senator Patty Murray asked Pete Hegseth a question that should have had a clear answer. How much did this war cost? That's it. That's all she wanted to know. And what she got back was a refusal. It was a refusal to answer. And that refusal reveals the larger problem. Here is the exchange.

[00:00:19]Mr. Secretary, the war in Iran has not only cost 13 American service member lives, it is also costing American taxpayers dearly. Tens of billions of dollars and counting, and that's money that could be helping people perhaps get health care. But instead, we're paying for bombs dropped in a war that American people overwhelmingly opposed.

[00:00:40]Now, earlier this morning, I know that your team testified Trump's war with Iran cost 29 billion so far.

[00:00:47]That is 29 billion dollars blown on a war of choice, and that's what it would have cost actually to save the ACA tax credits.

[00:00:55]But as my colleagues have already stated, what is concerning as well as it seems quite clear that is that cost estimate is suspiciously low. Now, your acting comptroller suggested that damage to US facilities was not factored into that figure. It is clear that there has been extensive damage to American military assets. New reporting from the Washington Post and others indicates that Iran has hit at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at US military sites. Can you tell us what the cost of damage done to US facilities is because of this war?

[00:01:34]Well, [clears throat] I think Jay covered pretty clearly what we can or cannot share, but I would I would simply respond that um and I and I think it's important point considering what the president is undertaking is what is the cost of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. And the fact that this president's been willing to make a historic and courageous choice to confront that, it comes with cost and we recognize that and we honor that.

[00:01:53]>> is. We have a judgment as well, and I'm asking if you can tell us and at what point you can tell us what the cost of damage done to US facilities is because of this war. Yeah, ma'am, thanks for the question. So, for future posture at least, we don't know what that's going to look like. We don't know how we're going to design these bases.

[00:02:10]>> to date, you do not have any cost estimate on it at all. For the military construction, I don't have a cost estimate to provide you at this time.

[00:02:16]Well, when will we get that?

[00:02:18]Again, it depends on what the future posture is, how we decide to construct those bases.

[00:02:22]>> you know what has happened today. We can't get that number, and that is a real concern to us. Our job is to appropriate dollars, and we're just told it's coming, it's coming, and we don't get it. So, it's very hard to do our budgets. And right now, Mr. Secretary, people are paying four, five, even six, seven dollars uh for gas, and American taxpayers are now on the hook as well for paying for this disastrous war.

[00:02:45]You're spending families' hard-earned tax dollars on a war that many strongly oppose. And you're forcing people to pay more at the pump, and yet you're not even providing a real breakdown for the cost of this war so far. We have no real details. You have indicated that. And yet, now you want Congress to send you one and a half trillion dollars more. To me, that is unacceptable, and I hope our Republican colleagues will join us in not only rejecting that absurd request, but in insisting that the American people get the actual answers on how much money, their money, we're we are spending on this.

[00:03:23]Now, let me turn and say Secretary Heck says that the president has called Medicaid, Medicare, and child care little scams, and said, quote, "We're fighting wars we cannot take uh care of daycare." I'm just trying to understand that. Is it your position, since you're asking taxpayers for another half a trillion dollars for the war, that American families should be forced to give up child care and health coverage so that you can have one and a half trillion dollars for this budget.

[00:03:54]Senator, that's that's not my department. I certainly support this and I also support the president's efforts to find and remove fraud wherever possible in general sense. And we do that in our department as well. I'm not I'm not talking about fraud. I actually asked whether an American family should lose their health care or their child care to pay for this budget. That is literally what the president suggested.

[00:04:18]The president has proposed a historic 1.5 trillion dollar budget that will defend the nation and confront threats like Iran which previous presidents allowed to happen as Senator Graham pointed out. Previous administration said they wanted to take care of this problem and they did not. He's doing it.

[00:04:36]>> is what are they being asked to give up for this one and a half trillion dollars. That's where I was talking about and uh lastly Mr. Secretary, your budget request cuts through Trump's ramblings and really to me makes the truth clear that you and the president don't value families as much as you value defense contractors. You want to increase the war budget let me finish.

[00:04:58]>> at Dover. Okay, don't tell me we don't care about families. We sure do and we take care of them in every way we possibly can. I'm asking you about taxpayer dollars that everybody has to when we've been to war before we've asked people to do victory gardens.

[00:05:11]We've asked them to pay more. You are not doing that. You're taking one asking for one and a half trillion dollars which means something else has to be given up. That is what this committee is looking at. You want to increase the war budget for the next year by half a trillion dollars. That is taxpayer money that could be used to feed families or build new affordable homes or wipe out some diseases completely or increase child investments 20 times over.

[00:05:38]But you are asking us to blow it all on war and that's not even counting the money that you have spent bombing Iran or that you may still request in a separate supplemental.

[00:05:47]And to me, this budget wasn't even strategically crafted. $1.5 trillion is like the president decided that was the number and you all filled in the blanks. So, what I'm here today to say is you asked for a massive laundry list of unnecessary spending. It's a huge payday for defense contractors and you still don't even ask to give DOD civilian workers a pay raise. And to me, this is absurd. I know you do not care what I have to say. So, let me quote you someone you might actually listen to.

[00:06:17]President Eisenhower. He said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

[00:06:42]That is what this budget proposal is asking. It's going to leave Americans cold and hungry to fund Trump's war and make defense contractors a fortune. So, that is why I hope this committee throws that in the trash and comes together with a budget that works for all American families. Thank Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Okay. So, here's what you need to understand about that number, the $29 billion the White House gave to Congress that day. That number reveals the problem. It shows they knew something was wrong. When Jules Hurst, the temporary chief financial officer, raised the estimated cost, he said the change came from updated repair and replacement of equipment cost. Let that sink in. That means the original $25 billion number, the number Congress has been using for weeks, the number every hearing about checking the war has been based on, was based on a guess. It was only a guess about the future. And the Pentagon just told you it was wrong.

[00:07:31]That is an admission. That's an admission that every single conversation this Congress has had about the cost of this war has been based on bad information. And that's still just the government's official number. The Center for International Policy puts the real cost at about $72 billion, nearly three times what the Pentagon has told Congress, nearly three times. And by the way, you want to know where the most complete damage report of this war actually came from? The Department of Defense, the part of the government that runs the military, failed to provide it.

[00:08:00]The Secretary of Defense's sworn testimony to the Armed Services Committee, the Senate group that handles military issues, failed to provide it, too. It came from the Washington Post. A newspaper with a paid satellite image service produced a more accurate damage account than the Pentagon gave Congress.

[00:08:16]228 structures hit across 15 American military bases. And federal law has clear rules for when the Pentagon must notify Congress about serious property damage. Whether those rules were met here, whether the reports the law requires actually happened, neither Hegseth nor the committee ever got a clean answer on that. They called it a question about paperwork. It is a question about who is responsible. Now, here's the legal part, cuz this matters a lot. The War Powers Resolution of 1973, a law about when presidents can use the military, gives the president 60 days to carry out military actions without permission from Congress. After that, he needs a vote or he needs to end the fighting. The White House formally told Congress about the war on March 2nd.

[00:08:59]That clock ran out on May 1st, 11 days before Murray questioned him. And rather than seek a congressional vote, the White House sent a letter saying that a pause in fighting ordered on April 7th had legally ended the fighting. The clock is over, war's done, move along.

[00:09:15]That was their argument. Except, look, one of the people making that argument was the same president who told reporters on the exact same day as this hearing that the ceasefire was on life support and that Tehran's latest peace proposal was totally unacceptable. So, their argument for why the 60-day clock doesn't apply is that the war is over.

[00:09:35]And the president's argument as head of the military on the same afternoon is that the war is barely holding together.

[00:09:42]You cannot have it both ways. You don't get to say you won the legal argument and declare a military crisis on the same day in the news and expect nobody to notice. And notice they did. Consider who challenged him publicly. Republicans challenged him, too. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski told him directly that the 60-day clock had expired and that Congress needed to use the power the Constitution gives it. Maine Senator Susan Collins pointed out that there was no clear plan for the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for oil shipping. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham questioned Pakistan's role as the country trying to help both sides make a deal and said he personally wanted into those talks. Three Republican senators under Republican control publicly criticized this administration's management of the war. And here's what's important. What those three senators said publicly, they backed up the next morning. On May 13th, Murkowski, Collins, and Rand Paul voted in the Senate to end the war. The vote to end the war failed by one vote, 49 to 50, one vote. Now, let's talk about what this war is actually costing ordinary people. The week before the hearing, the president suggested pausing the gas tax, right? Just compare that to the bigger picture for a second. The national tax on gas is 18.4 cents per gallon. Pausing it saves the average driver roughly $3 per fill-up, $3. Meanwhile, the military budget increase the White House is asking for at the same time costs the average American household many times more than that savings every year.

[00:11:07]Before this war started, the average price of regular gas across the country was $2.98 a gallon. By May 12th, it was $4.50.

[00:11:17]That's more than a 50% increase in under 11 weeks. Diesel fuel is over $5 a gallon. Plane fuel is up 85% which is why your airline ticket is more expensive. Prices rose by 3.8% in April, highest rate in 3 years. These numbers hit people's wallets right now, and here's why none of it is going away quietly. IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The Strait of Hormuz carries around 20% of the world's oil use, usually 20 million barrels a day, and Iran slowed that flow to almost nothing in hours. The agency's own analysis says the oil supply now cut off is bigger than the 1973 oil crisis that caused it to be created first place. And experts at ClearView Energy Partners are warning that even after a deal reopens the strait, prices and supply take time to recover. Oil companies restart slowly.

[00:12:10]Oil ships change routes. Prices don't drop the day the shooting stops. The families paying $4.50 for gas right now need to understand that. Now, compare the request for more money with all of that, $1.5 trillion.

[00:12:22]That's a 42% increase over 2026 military spending. And the White House's own budget papers describe it as exceeding the military build-up during President Reagan's time, approaching increases last seen before World War II. 350 billion of it gets pushed through a special budget bill, a process that avoids a Senate delay tactic called the filibuster, and gives senators less time to debate. And here's who pointed out the problem with that. Tom Cole, the House leader in charge of spending bills, Republican Oklahoma, the leader of the committee that would actually have to vote to allow this spending, said publicly, and I'm quoting him directly, "At some point the money disappears." The Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee is telling you the way to pay for this budget might not hold. Think about that.

[00:13:08]And here's the thing that ties all of this together. As of May 12th, this administration still had sent Congress no extra spending bill to pay for the war. No bill, which means the $29 billion already spent, the lowest official estimate, was taken from money the Pentagon already had without a clear vote from Congress allowing that spending. Who approved it? Which vote covered it? No vote covered it.

[00:13:31]Democratic and Republican senators asked who was responsible for that spending.

[00:13:35]What they got was a number everyone now acknowledges was wrong and a damage report the Pentagon failed to provide.

[00:13:41]Pew Research surveyed 3,524 adults and found 59% say striking Iran was the wrong decision. Quinnipiac found 53% of voters oppose the war and 74% oppose sending in ground troops. And NPR, PBS News, and Marist Poll found 63% of Americans blame the president for the gas price spike including nearly 1/3 of his own parties voters. This has become a national political problem. The Marist Poll found 59% of independents disapprove. A Fox News Poll found 58% of American voters oppose this war. That is the country giving its judgment. That problem reaches beyond his strongest supporters. That's a country problem.

[00:14:22]Now consider who Murray ended by citing.

[00:14:25]Dwight Eisenhower, graduate of West Point, a famous military school, one of the highest ranking generals, top commander of Allied Forces in World War II. He is also a West Point graduate, a former Army officer, and a person who built his public image around military service and pride in the military as an institution. She read Eisenhower's words and he answered with a story about families of fallen service members. He avoided the actual argument. He offered no real response. A military officer challenged by the words of one of the most honored soldiers in American history failed to answer the actual point. That silence tells you something.

[00:15:00]It tells you the thinking behind this military policy cannot survive a serious question. And here's what people missed about that speech. The speech also warned about something deeper than the human cost of military spending.

[00:15:13]Eisenhower was warning about the cycle that keeps feeding itself between always being ready for war and depending too much on weapons companies. That's not a distant or theoretical worry right now.

[00:15:23]Members of Congress are pointing out that this war has used up American weapon supplies faster than the weapons industry can replace them. That warning from 1953 became today's Pentagon readiness problem. It became the current Pentagon report on whether the military is ready. And by the way, Murray left out another part. Eisenhower argued that always being ready for war makes democracy harder to keep going. That the Soviet system built around military power and the American military system were becoming more like the same kind of system. That part would have hit much harder. The fact that she gave him the calmest and fairest version of that argument and still got nothing back tells you everything about the failure of accountability. She was quoting a Republican president. She was quoting the man the Republican Party once held up as the gold standard of American strength and seriousness about government spending. That quote worked as a test. It exposed the contradiction.

[00:16:12]At the same time, the president publicly answered a question about Americans financial pain. And a reporter asked him to what extent are Americans financial struggles motivating you to reach a deal and end this war? His answer, without hesitation, not even a little bit. I don't think about Americans financial situation. I don't think about anybody.

[00:16:30]The Pentagon failed to produce the cost of the war. The president publicly confirmed his lack of interest in knowing it. Murray asked the central accountability question. The president's own words supplied the answer. Her question exposed who this government thinks it has to answer to. The next morning, 49 senators gave their answer.

[00:16:48]The measure to end the war failed by a single vote. One vote. If this topic got you thinking, don't keep that opinion to yourself. Put your reaction in the comments and let's get the conversation going. Smash the like button if you want more videos covering stories like this.

[00:17:01]Hit the bell so you know the moment a new video goes live. Subscribe to stay connected with the latest political talk, news, and debates. I appreciate you rocking with the channel and I'll see you in the next one.

[00:17:36]>> Mhm.