Senate advances legislation to withhold pay from senators during government shutdowns

(NEW YORK) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth heads to Capitol Hill Wednesday for what is formally billed as a routine hearing on the Pentagon’s budget request.

But the appearance — the first before Congress for Hegseth since the war in Iran began in February — lands just two days before a 60-day deadline to wind down hostilities.

It also comes amid intensifying questions on the Hill about how quickly the Pentagon is depleting weapons stockpiles, and as lawmakers continue to scrutinize Hegseth’s unusual spate of firings of senior defense officials without a public explanation.

Questions over civilian casualties in the Iran war, as well as whether the U.S. was properly prepared for retaliatory strikes, and broader questions over the strategic rationale for the conflict, are likely to be a key part of committee members on both sides of the aisle questioning of Hegseth, multiple congressional aides explained. 

This week marks Hegseth’s first return to Capitol Hill in nearly a year — with testimony Wednesday before the House Armed Services Committee and Thursday on the Senate side — and his first exposure to sustained scrutiny since the war with Iran began. He’ll be joined by Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff at both hearings. 

While Hegseth has appeared before the press since the conflict began in late February, he has largely limited engagement to reporters viewed as sympathetic to the administration.

At the center of this week’s hearings is the administration’s request for $1.5 trillion in defense spending, the largest amount in the Pentagon’s history and a jump of 50% over current levels, which would mark the largest single-year increase in a generation.

The proposal would triple spending on drones and related technologies to more than $74 billion, while directing over $30 billion toward munitions procurement. But that budget request was developed months ago: not account for spending in the war with Iran.

“The overlap, you’ll see, is the request for munitions, which is something we always need,” Jules Hurst III, acting undersecretary of defense and the Pentagon’s comptroller, told reporters last week. “We always need to increase our magazine depth. But outside of that, there aren’t any operational costs in here from Iran.” Hurst is set to join Hegseth and Caine at the Senate hearing on Thursday.

That means the Pentagon may require additional funding to cover the cost of the vast quantities of munitions being expended as U.S. forces have struck more than 13,000 targets in Iran since February, along with other significant war-related expenses.

Defense experts have long raised concerns about stockpile constraints even before the war with Iran, with some estimates of a potential conflict with China suggesting the United States could exhaust long-range missile inventories within the first few weeks of fighting.

In less than two months of exchanging fire with Iran, the U.S. has used roughly half of certain missiles and other munitions, according to an analysis published last week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Retired Col. Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at CSIS and an author of the report, said Operation Epic Fury “does create a window of vulnerability” for a period of as many as four years – the time it would take to replenish stocks.

“The United States has enough munitions to fight this war if it stubs up again,” Cancian said. “But the risk is in a future war with China, where inventory levels are far below where war planners would like them to be.”

Pentagon officials have maintained the U.S. has enough ammo to fight Iran. Though rearming the force with new munitions can take years, with some missiles requiring one to two years to build, reflecting an inherent limit on how many complex munitions the defense industry can produce each year, spurring much of the interest in huge investments in relatively cheap, easier-to-produce drones, which the Pentagon continues to surge into the Middle East. 

Hegseth is also likely to face questions on his unprecedented firing or sidelining of two dozen senior military officials, particularly during a time of war, where he recently fired Gen. Randy George, who was the Army’s top officer and John Phelan, the Navy secretary.

Hegseth has also fired numerous lower-profile generals, without explanation, including Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., who was the chief of the Army Chaplain Corps, a collection of clergy from different faiths within the service. He has also blocked the promotion of four colonels to brigadier general, two of whom are women and two are Black, according to two U.S. officials, who both described a secretary of defense intervening in promotions as unprecedented.

Meanwhile, Democrats have failed in their multiple attempts to rein in President Donald Trump’s authority to wage war in Iran without Capitol Hill’s approval.

The 1973 War Powers Resolution gives the president latitude to conduct military strikes for a 60-day window, which closes Friday. The law allows for a one-time 30-day extension for the president to act without the consent of lawmakers, though it is unclear whether Trump intends to do so or whether Republicans will take into account the ceasefire in a way that relieves any deadline pressure.

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(WASHINGTON) — Public records show that President Donald Trump voted by mail in the special election occurring Tuesday for the statehouse district that includes his Mar-a-Lago estate in spite of his longstanding rhetoric against voting by mail and his efforts to push through the SAVE America Act, which includes restrictions on mail-in voting.

According to public records available on the Palm Beach County elections website, Trump voted by mail ballot in the special election for Florida’s 87th House district.

Trump has spoken critically about voting by mail for years. As recently as Monday, during remarks in Memphis, Tennessee, the president said that “mail-in voting means mail-in cheating — I call it mail-in cheating — and we got to do something about it all.”

A White House spokesperson, in response to a request for comment, said that Trump has supported “commonsense exceptions” to allow Americans to use mail-in ballots, including for “illness, disability, military, or travel,” but that he opposes universal voting by mail due to it being “highly susceptible to fraud.”

An analysis from the Brookings Institution from November 2025 found that voter fraud is rare in voting by mail.

“As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C.,” spokesperson Olivia Wales wrote in a statement.

Trump frequently visits his Mar-a-Lago estate and was there as recently as Monday morning.

The SAVE America Act, promoted by Trump, would place some new requirements and restrictions on voting by mail.

Florida’s 87th House district special election was scheduled after Mike Caruso, who previously represented the district, was appointed to a county role. Democrats have been eyeing the district as one they could potentially flip, with an eye toward the irony of flipping the president’s home district. Trump and Republicans, meanwhile, have been promoting Republican candidate Jon Maples in an effort to keep the seat in GOP hands.

This is not the first time Trump has voted by mail while president. He voted by mail in the 2020 Florida presidential primary — after he switched his formal place of residence from New York to Florida in September 2019.

Other presidents have voted in elections in their home states while in office. Then-President Joe Biden, for instance, flew to Delaware to vote in the 2022 primaries.

ABC News’ Michelle Stoddart contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — Top Trump administration officials have touted diplomatic efforts to end the war in Iran as the president signals it could end without pursuing the challenging military operation of opening the Strait of Hormuz with naval escorts.

In an interview with “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not cite the reopening of the strait, the vital chokepoint of which 20% of the world’s oil flows through, which has been largely closed to shipping traffic, as a U.S. objective. President Donald Trump in the early days of the war said the U.S. Navy would take measures to ensure ships could sail there.

Rubio listed the “destruction” of Iran’s air force, navy, missile-launch capacity and military industry as the four objectives of what he termed a U.S. “operation.”

“All of this so that they can never hide behind it to acquire a nuclear weapon,” Rubio said. “That was our objective from the beginning; that remains our objective now.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Tuesday also omitted freedom of movement in the Strait of Hormuz as one of the Pentagon’s priorities, instead calling on other nations with energy interests there to be involved in reopening it.

The president shifted responsibility over the strait — whose access has been largely blocked by Iran as a response to the U.S. and Israel attacks on the country — to those allies and partners.

“They can police it themselves,” Trump told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Tuesday. “Why should I do it for them?”

The apparent recalibration — just days after Trump threatened intensified military action if Iran did not move to open the strait — signals the US could be plotting an exit in which it declares it’s accomplished the outlined military objectives without seeking to repair the war’s most devastating economic consequence, a former senior U.S. diplomat said.

“I think Rubio may have signaled one option the president has,” said the former diplomat who engaged in negotiations with Iran. “It’s not a very good one, but … of the bad and worse options, it’s probably the better bad option.”

The former U.S. official said a hasty exit from the conflict without addressing two of its thorniest issues — the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear stockpile — suggests there is a diplomatic deal to be achieved that would end the fighting.

“I think Rubio, at least, sounds like he just wants to bring this [conflict] to closure along the parameters that he outlined, and then hope that world pressure opens the Strait of Hormuz,” the former official said.

Objectives articulated by the administration earlier in the conflict — like regime change and denuclearization — would remain unmet by such a deal, the former diplomat said.

Tehran’s diplomatic view
Whether or not the U.S. is pursuing a diplomatic exit, it will be complicated for a battered Iran to deal with a country that initiated a war with it a month ago, analysts of Tehran’s government told ABC News.

Iran may be open to diplomacy, the analysts said, but it would seek durable assurances that it will not be attacked by the U.S. — or Israel — in the future.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tuesday that his country was not negotiating with the U.S. but that messages were being passed.

Pakistan, who along with Turkey and Egypt has positioned itself as an intermediary between the U.S. and Iran, have been delivering those messages between the warring nations, establishing an important “venue” for talks, said Syed Mohammad Ali, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and analyst of Pakistani politics.

“I think the most important thing here is to have created a channel of mediation,” Ali said. “And in conflict situations that is of vital importance.”

Ali, who is familiar with the early negotiations, said early diplomatic exchanges have been “maximalist” as the two sides remain far apart.

He cautioned that Pakistan, which has offered to host direct talks, would by itself “not be in a position to really help hammer this out … they can continue playing this role, but the terms are going to be set elsewhere.”

The introduction of China to diplomatic discussions, he said, could bring the kind of “big power pressure” and “strategic leverage” that the US and Iran, whose economies are intertwined with Beijing’s, might respond to.

The Chinese and Pakistani governments released a five-point plan, which called for an immediate ceasefire and “normal passage” through the Strait of Hormuz, after a meeting of their foreign ministers in Beijing on Tuesday. Trump is set to visit China in May.

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an expert on Iranian politics and economics and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins, said any durable diplomatic breakthrough would likely follow a set of “high-level principles” that enables a ceasefire.

Leaders of the Iranian regime won’t readily come to the negotiating table, Batmanghelidj said, unless the conflict is perceived as a “stalemate” with the U.S. and talks are not framed as capitulation to Trump. Hardliners in Tehran, including leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps which would be allergic to negotiating with Washington, are still believed to wield considerable influence.

But “the elements” for a deal “are there,” Batmanghelidj said.

“Ultimately, this war has gone well enough for the Iranians that they can also point to a victory, but it has also been painful enough that even those that are very hardline in the Iranian system will understand that they don’t want to run a country that has been turned into some sort of basket case.”

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