18JUN

White House funds war without Congress

3 min read

09:57UTC

Congress rejected war authorisation twice in one week. The White House is spending $891 million a day anyway, drawing on Pentagon accounts never designed for a campaign of this scale.

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EconomicAssessed

Key takeaway

Congress holds two war-checking levers — authorisation and appropriation — and by formally refusing both, it has placed enforcement entirely on courts that have historically declined to intervene in live combat spending decisions.

The White House has not requested supplemental funding from Congress for a campaign consuming $891 million per day. Congress — which rejected the Kaine–Paul War Powers Resolution 47–53 in the Senate on Wednesday and defeated the Massie–Khanna resolution in the House on Thursday — has been asked for neither war authorisation nor war funding.

The statute at issue is the Antideficiency Act (31 U.S.C. §§ 1341–1342), which prohibits federal officers from obligating or expending funds beyond amounts Congress has appropriated. Violations carry criminal penalties: fines up to $5,000 and imprisonment of up to two years. No executive official has ever been criminally prosecuted under the Act for wartime spending. Enforcement has been administrative — reprimands and reassignments — making the statute a constraint that has never been tested in practice at anything approaching this expenditure rate.

The Administration's legal footing for the operation itself rests on Article II commander-in-chief authority and the War Powers Resolution's 60-day clock, which began when strikes started on 28 February and expires in late April. The Resolution requires the President either to withdraw forces or obtain congressional authorisation within that window. Every president since Nixon has questioned its constitutionality; no court has ruled definitively. The funding question is more immediately pressing: existing DoD accounts are finite, and at $891 million per day, available balances may be exhausted before the constitutional clock runs out.

The arrangement has no precedent at this scale. Congress twice declined to authorise the war. Congress twice declined to stop it. The White House has not asked for money. The executive is drawing down accounts filled by prior appropriations for purposes Congress did not envision. Each additional day of operations deepens the gap between what has been authorised and what is being spent — a gap that only a supplemental appropriations bill or a ceasefire can close.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

The US constitution gives Congress — not the president — the power to declare war and to control government spending. A law called the Antideficiency Act specifically forbids spending money that Congress hasn't approved. The administration is spending billions on a war that Congress both refused to authorise and has not funded. The reason this hasn't stopped the operation is that courts have historically been unwilling to interfere in active military campaigns — judges worry about the consequences of stopping a war mid-execution. The administration is betting that by the time any legal challenge reaches a court ruling, the operation will be complete or Congress will have been pressured into retroactively approving the spending.

Deep Analysis

Synthesis

The administration's strategy appears to treat the Antideficiency Act violation as politically safer than requesting a supplemental appropriation. A supplemental request would force a congressional vote that could impose operational conditions, timelines, or geographic restrictions; spending violations produce only slow-moving legal challenges. The legal risk is deferred and may never materialise; the political risk of a messy congressional debate is avoided entirely. This calculus is rational given precedent but normalises the complete subordination of war-funding to executive discretion.

Root Causes

The Antideficiency Act's enforcement mechanism relies on congressional political will to cut off funding — a step no Congress has taken against an ongoing US military operation because of the 'defunding the troops' political dynamic. Once combat is joined, the appropriations power becomes functionally unenforceable through normal legislative channels, leaving only judicial challenge as a check — and courts have consistently declined to adjudicate war powers disputes on justiciability grounds.

What could happen next?

Risk
If a federal court issues an injunction against unappropriated military spending — unlikely but not impossible given the scale — mid-campaign funding disruption could force operational pauses at a moment of tactical vulnerability.
Short term · Suggested
Consequence
Congress faces a structural dilemma: passing a retroactive supplemental validates both the spending and the war it explicitly rejected, while refusing it invites a constitutional crisis over whether military operations must halt.
Short term · Assessed
Precedent
Sustaining a major air campaign on unappropriated funds at this expenditure scale establishes that presidential war-making is financially self-sustaining without legislative consent, structurally weakening congressional war powers for all future administrations regardless of party.
Long term · Assessed
Risk
Individual DoD officials authorising unappropriated expenditures face theoretical Antideficiency Act personal liability; while enforcement is historically nil, the legal exposure may create a chilling effect on financial management decisions in future administrations.
Medium term · Suggested

Source Landscape

This story draws on left-leaning sources from United States

United States

LeftRight

The 1973 War Powers Resolution was designed to prevent presidents from sustaining military operations without congressional funding approval, but has never been successfully enforced against a sitting president.

Clinton (Kosovo, 1999) and Obama (Libya, 2011) both conducted sustained operations without authorisation; however, neither campaign approached current daily expenditure levels, meaning existing appropriations headroom was never exhausted.

The Truman administration's Korean War financing (1950-53) — drawing on existing Pentagon appropriations for the first months before seeking supplementals — is the closest structural precedent, but Korean War daily costs were an order of magnitude lower and the political climate was one of broad congressional support, not explicit rejection of authorisation.

Why it’s relevant now

In every prior instance where a president bypassed war authorisation, scale kept spending within existing appropriations; this conflict has broken through that headroom by $3.5 billion in four days, meaning the Antideficiency Act is being tested at expenditure levels that no previous administration has attempted, against a Congress that already voted to withhold authorisation.

Lawfare Institute scholars including Jack Goldsmith (Harvard) and Robert Chesney (University of Texas) have previously argued that the Commander-in-Chief clause creates an implied appropriation authority for emergency military action, but this doctrine has never been validated by the Supreme Court.

The Antideficiency Act's civil and criminal penalties — codified at 31 U.S.C. §§ 1341-1342 — technically apply to individual officers who authorise unlawful expenditures, meaning the Secretary of Defence and service secretaries face potential personal liability; prosecution of a sitting cabinet official under this statute for wartime spending is historically unprecedented and widely considered politically unthinkable, creating an effective enforcement vacuum.

Sources:CNN

Mentions:Rand Paul →Tim Kaine →Thomas Massie →Antideficiency Act →Pentagon →White House →

First Reported In

Update #24 · Trump demands unconditional surrender

CNN· 6 Mar 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Senate kills war powers check, 47–53

Senate's rejection of war powers resolution means Congress declined to constrain executive authority, yet also has not appropriated supplemental funds for the campaign — creating the Antideficiency Act legal question

Occurred 4 Mar 2026

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House defeats war powers bill

House defeat of war powers resolution compounds the legal ambiguity: both chambers refused to authorise the war but also refused to stop it, while spending accelerates beyond appropriated amounts

Occurred 5 Mar 2026

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This Event

White House funds war without Congress

The administration is spending $891 million per day under legal authorities untested at this scale, without supplemental funding from a Congress that twice rejected war authorisation. Existing DoD accounts are finite; at current burn rates, the gap between spending and authorisation grows by nearly $900 million every day.

Different Perspectives

Cross-border power traders

The France-Germany day-ahead spread flipped from a EUR 17.20 German premium on 1 August to a EUR 4.15 French premium on 3 August, the same day French curtailment peaked. They cannot yet attribute the flip to curtailment alone, since a like-for-like overnight comparison shows French nuclear output rising while wind fell and demand returned on the weekday step.

EDF

River-cooling limits took 7.6 GW, 12 per cent of its fleet, offline on 3 August, the highest curtailment since the heatwave began, with an easing forecast to 4.3 GW on 4 August and 3 GW after. It manages the cut as a recurring seasonal constraint, expecting it to lift with river temperature, not repair.

Gasunie

TTF, the Dutch hub it operates, drifted to roughly EUR 55 to 58 per MWh across the window, staying inside its recent range through both the German spark reversal and the French curtailment. It reads a flat hub price as evidence that neither event this window carried enough weight to move the fuel leg on its own.

German gas-fired generators

Record German solar of 18,761 MW on 2 August pushed the clean spark spread to minus 18.48 EUR/MWh, a loss-making day, before it returned to plus 16.20 on 3 August. They now price dispatch against post-solar residual load rather than wind alone, since the sign flipped inside 48 hours on unchanged fuel and carbon costs.

European Commission (DG Energy)

Its implementing-measures register logged transposition notices from only Portugal and Slovakia against Wednesday's Article 94 deadline for Directive (EU) 2024/1788, with 25 states silent. It expects the register to fill only gradually, since filing routinely lags legislating and any infringement track against non-notifying states runs on a slower clock than the deadline itself.

Spain's LNG terminal operators

Spain's 9,145 GWh terminal inventory is the largest single stock in the EU LNG network, an option value that can reroute cargoes wherever the winter strip pays best rather than a cavern gas obligation tied to a fixed date. That flexibility matters more as Germany's cavern shortfall pushes more of the winter security question onto import infrastructure.