Frustrated lawmakers are increasing pressure on the defense secretary to get answers they’ve sought for months.
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Frustrated senators are threatening to withhold 75 percent of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget unless the Pentagon provides Congress with answers about an apparent U.S. strike on a girls’ school in Iran and the military’s ongoing attacks targeting alleged drug smuggling boats in Latin America.
The proposal is tucked into an early version of the Senate’s 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), sprawling, must-pass legislation that sets Defense Department priorities. It reflects the growing bipartisan frustration over the Pentagon’s refusal to comply with congressional requests.
The Pentagon said it would not comment on pending legislation.
Since that episode in early September, U.S. forces have killed more than 200 people in strikes on small boasts in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.
The Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee advanced the bill by a vote of 18-9 last week and has since made the legislation public. The committee is seeking unedited footage of every boat strike in waters around Latin America.
Lawmakers have also sought information on the military’s investigation into how a girls school in Iran was apparently targeted by a Navy Tomahawk missile on Feb. 28, during the war’s initial hours. The strike, for which the U.S. government has not publicly accepted blame amid an ongoing investigation, killed more than 170 people, most of them children, Iranian officials have said.
No one has yet been held accountable for those deaths. The investigation is being conducted by U.S. Central Command.
Speaking Wednesday at the Group of Seven summit in France, President Donald Trump said the investigation was ongoing but “nobody did that on purpose.”
“Mistakes are made,” the president said, adding, “war is nasty.”
The Senate committee’s draft of the defense bill must still pass the full chamber. It will then need to be reconciled with the House Armed Services Committee’s version, which so far would restrict 25 percent of Hegseth’s travel budget if the Pentagon does not provide lawmakers with the desired materials.
The legislation must then pass the full Congress, expected late this year.
A similar House proposal made it into law last year, though it was unclear how close Hegseth had come to reaching the spending threshold.
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“We’ve been asking for these kinds of things for some time,” said one Senate staffer, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss the lawmakers’ frustration with the Pentagon’s noncompliance. “So we’re trying to use all the tools for more enforcement now.”
The proposal to restrict Hegseth’s travel budget was reported earlier by Politico.
GOP hawks have been deeply unhappy, too, about the Trump administration’s refusal to consult Congress on its plans for sweeping cuts to U.S. troop levels in Europe. The Senate bill seeks to further restrict the Pentagon’s ability to withdraw troops from the continent without first alerting lawmakers.
Spokesmen for the committee’s top Republicans, Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker and Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
If passed, the withholding of travel funds would not only impact Hegseth, but his deputy as well and anyone in his office seeking to conduct official travel, the Senate staffer said.
While Hegseth does not go on as many international trips as his predecessors have, he frequently travels to domestic military bases and sometimes has brought members of his family along. The secretary is currently in Brussels, where he is due to meet with NATO defense ministers.
Hegseth’s political staff at the Pentagon has said that the secretary pays for his family to join him on official travel, such as this month’s trip to France where he took six of his children, but to date they have not disclosed documentation verifying that he has reimbursed the government.
“I cannot rubber stamp $1.5 trillion — the largest defense budget ever proposed in our nation’s history — with zero checks,” Duckworth said.
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Michael Birnbaum contributed to this report.
