Iran war has cost $37.5bn so far, Hegseth tells Senate – US politics live

This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to an end for the day, with just 913 more to come. Here are the latest developments:

• As he wages war on Iran to prevent that country from enriching uranium, Donald Trump has reportedly approved a deal with â Saudi Arabia to have US firms build a civilian nuclear energy program in the kingdom, which could include a uranium enrichment facility, US officials told the Wall Street Journal. The deal, which the administration plans to submit â to Congress â in the ​coming days, does not include safeguards to stop ‌materials being used in nuclear weapons programs, Reuters reports.

• The US-Israeli war on Iran has cost the Pentagon $37.5bn so far, defense secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday.

• “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,†New York mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a video statement in which he called the International Criminal Court warrant for the Israeli prime minister's arrest justified but admitted that he lacks the legal authority to enforce it.

• Donald Trump announced a new package of tariffs on Tuesday, this time on generic drugs made overseas, to begin in 2028.

• The Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday advanced the nomination of Jay Clayton to serve as the US intelligence director, despite criticism from Democrats.

• The Trump administration paused more than $1bn in Medicaid funding to California and Minnesota, two states run by elected Democrats, citing “suspected fraud and noncomplianceâ€.

As he wages war on Iran to prevent that country from enriching uranium, Donald Trump has reportedly approved a deal with â Saudi Arabia to have US firms build a civilian nuclear energy program in the kingdom, which could include a uranium enrichment facility, US officials told the Wall Street Journal.

The deal, which the administration plans to submit â to Congress â in the ​coming days, does not include safeguards to prevent the uranium from being used to make nuclear weapons, Reuters reports.

The 30-year deal is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars, the Journal reports.

The agreement could be signed as soon as Wednesday by the US energy secretary , Chris Wright, and the ​Saudi ​energy minister, Abdulaziz bin Salman.

The ​two ‌men signed a ​preliminary ​agreement in Riyadh last year.

Trump has previously scoffed at the idea that Iran might need or want to enrich uranium for peaceful civilian purposes, including energy.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,†New York mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Tuesday in a video statement in which he called the International Criminal Court warrant for the Israeli prime minister's arrest justified but admitted that he lacks the legal authority to enforce it.

“My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here,†Mamdani said. “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.â€

“The federal government, however, does— and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant,†the mayor added, one day after Donald Trump rejected the idea, writing on social media: “Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.â€

“Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large,†Mamdani said.

Netanyahu is expected to travel to New York in September to address the United Nations general assembly.

For many years, the Israeli prime minister has made the supposed threat posed by Iran's nuclear enrichment program the focus of his annual speech to the UN. Last year, scores of delegates walked out of the hall before he could begin.

Unlike 125 other countries, the United States is not a state party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, and so is not obligated to arrest indicted war crimes suspects.

Last week, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced “a sweeping campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the International Criminal Court to U.S. sovereignty†and promised to “systematically disable the ICC's ability to operateâ€.

The arrest of accused war crimes suspects has tested notions of sovereignty in international law in the past.

In 1998, the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested while visiting London on the orders of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón who sought Pinochet's extradi­tion to Spain to face charges of genocide, terrorism and torture. Pinochet was was detained for 16 months before the UK's home secretary decide that he was too ill to stand trial and allowed him to return home on compassionate grounds.

In 1960, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who organized the deportation of millions of European Jews to death camps, was secretly arrested by Israeli commandos in Argentina, where he had been living under an assumed name. Rather than request his extradition from an Argentine government that had given refuge to prominent Nazis, the Israeli snatch team held Eichmann for 10 days and smuggled him out of the country disguised as an El Al flight attendant to stand trial in Jerusalem.

As Donald Trump announces new tariffs daily, leading one sober trade expert to observe, “Tariff Crazytown is officially BACKâ€, Democratic lawmakers are lining up to promise to repeal the Trump tariffs as soon as they regain control of Congress.

“Democrats will flip the House. And on Day 1 of next term, Democrats will introduce legislation to repeal trump's disastrous tariffs. And we will pass it,†congressman Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, wrote after Trump imposed 50% tariffs on a range of goods from Canada on Monday, citing Section 338 of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 as his legal authority.

“Donald Trump has abused every trade authority at his disposal, and he is now excavating a law from the Great Depression to once again impose vast, unilateral tariffs on products from one of our closest allies and trading partners,†senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement. “This is yet another shakedown that will raise the cost-of-living for Americans, their families, and small businesses across the country. Trump cannot be trusted with tariff authority, and I will be introducing a bill very soon to rein him in and put Congress back in the driver's seat.â€

In a Substack column republished by the Toronto Star on Tuesday, the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote:

The Trade Act of 1930, generally known as the Smoot-Hawley tariff, lost its standing as the worst trade policy action in US history when Donald Trump imposed his “Liberation Day†tariffs in April 2025. But Smoot-Hawley was widely recognized as a terrible mistake soon after its passage, as it provoked widespread retaliation and contributed to the downward spiral of world trade that accompanied and reinforced the Great Depression. …

Yesterday the Trump administration invoked an obscure and never-before-used provision of Smoot-Hawley — Section 338 — to impose 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian goods. …

Whatever the real motivation for these new tariffs, they are almost surely illegal. They are definitely a violation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, a revision of NAFTA negotiated and signed by Trump himself during his first term …

So these latest actions confirm what most people around the world, from the European Commission to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard, have already figured out: a deal with Donald Trump lasts only until he feels like breaking it.

Donald Trump announced a new package of tariffs on Tuesday, this time on generic drugs made overseas, to begin in 2028.

The announcement, in a social media post, came just three months after the president issued a proclamation saying that generic pharmaceuticals “are not subject to tariffs at this time†but that decision “will be reassessed in one year.â€

Trump's latest head-spinning reversal on tariff policy means, he said, that generic drugs will continue to be imported tariff-free until 1 August 2028, when a 100% tariff would be imposed “for a one year period of time, and 200% thereafter.†The goal of the policy, Trump said, was to coerce drug makers into building plants in the United States.

Trump did not state what legal authority he was claiming to impose future tariffs on generic drugs, particularly the projected 200% tariff which would come into effect in August 2029, six months after the end of his final term.

The US-Israeli war on Iran has cost the Pentagon $37.5bn so far, defense secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday.

At the Senate hearing, which has now concluded, senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, asked Hegseth to explain why the Pentagon was asking Congress for an additional $67bn to pay for the war Trump started on 28 February when “the Department of Defense still has $75bn in unobligated funding from last year's reconciliation packageâ€.

“That 75,†Hegseth replied, “there's plans and designs on that part of the rebuild of our military which had to be undertaken.â€

Hegseth then launched into a deeply partisan attack on his predecessor, Lloyd Austin, the retired army general, for supposedly pursuing “woke priorities†instead of military readiness.

“I don't know what Lloyd Austin did for four years, I really don't,†he went on. “The amount of neglect, the amount of stale thinking and bureaucracy proceed staggering when we took over.â€

“Let me interrupt your speech for a minute, Mr Secretary,†Durbin cut in.

“You estimated at one point that the cost of the war in Iran was $29bn, but then added a caveat that there was a replacement of munitions, for example. Do you have a new estimate about what the war has cost us so far in this the fifth month of the first year of this war in Iran?†the senator asked.

“Senator, the estimate we have, as of today, is $37.5bn,†Hegseth answered.

Pressed further by Durbin, Hegseth said that was the estimated cost of the war on Iran through the end of the US government's financial year on 30 September.

The White House called on Tuesday for the House and Senate to pass the Republican SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, and photo ID to cast a ballot, after New Jersey's governor, Mikie Sherrill, revealed that a computer software error in the state's automatic voter registration system for licensed drivers mistakenly registered about 6,600 people who identified themselves as non-US citizens in 2023 and 2024.

According to Sherrill, who was not in office at the time, “fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted. They were registered as Democrats, Republicans and Unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state.â€

David Becker, a voting rights expert who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, put the size of the glitch into context in a statement sent to reporters.

“While administrative errors such as New Jersey's do infrequently occur, they are very rare and affect a very small fraction of voters. The states entrusted to run our elections are best positioned to detect and correct these errors, as they have access to substantially better data than the federal government,†Becker said.

“As CEIR's own research affirms, noncitizen registration remains extremely rare, and noncitizen voting is infinitesimally rare. In this case, the number of wrongful registrations represents a miniscule fraction, roughly 0.1%, of New Jersey's total active voter registration records in 2024,†he continued.

“The number of potential ballots cast from those incorrect registrations would represent roughly 0.009% of all ballots cast in New Jersey's 2024 general election, when Kamala Harris defeated President Trump by more than 250,000 votes,†Becker added. “Joe Biden actually defeated Trump by a margin three times as large before this error took place.â€

At the ongoing Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, pressed US defense secretary Pete Hegseth to say whether the US military could bomb a fortified underground site linked to Iran's nuclear program known as Pickaxe mountain, which the US has not yet targeted.

“We need straight answers,†Kennedy said with some exasperation. “Do we have the ability to destroy whatever is underneath Pickaxe mountain?â€

“Senator, a lot of our capabilities are classified, but if anybody in the world can reach anything on God's given, God's green Earth, it's the United States military,†Hegseth replied.

Kennedy's question was perhaps triggered by reports that experts suggest the site is beyond ​the reach of the most powerful bunker â buster bombs in ​the US arsenal.

Donald Trump was asked by a reporter earlier on Tuesday if he believes an Israeli intelligence assessment that Iran has moved nuclear centrifuges into tunnels deep inside the mountain, called Kolang Gaz La in Persian, which is about a mile from Iran's badly damaged â Natanz uranium enrichment ​facility.

“I think that they may have; we don't have it on record,†Trump replied, before veering into a digression to cast the speculation about the mountain as possibly flawed reporting from news outlets. “All we do is read the fake news, you know, we see… the news is so wrong so many times, so you know, maybe this one they have right.â€

“It doesn't mean anything unless they have the material. You're talking about the centrifuges,†Trump added. “We follow the material, that's where the action is, and we'll be hitting that area very, probably pretty soon and very heavily.â€

According to the nonpartisan Institute for Science and International Security think tank in Washington, this site was “not visibly attacked†by US bombers in 2025, when US bombers dropped two two GBU-57 bunker buster bombs on the nearby nuclear facility at Natanz.

“Iran announced in 2020 that the purpose of the Pickaxe tunnel complex is to hold an advanced centrifuge assembly facility that can produce several thousand centrifuges a year,†the institute reported last year. “In addition, based on the estimated size of the underground halls, the Institute several years ago assessed that site could also hold a centrifuge enrichment facility.â€

The Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday advanced the nomination of Jay Clayton to serve as the US intelligence director, despite criticism from Democrats.

Donald Trump had nominated Clayton, now the top federal prosecutor in the southern district of New York, for the role of the director of national intelligence (DNI) last month after the departure of Tulsi Gabbard.

Intelligence committee members questioned Clayton at a hearing last week, and its Republican chair, Tom Cotton, announced that it had reported his nomination favorably by a 9-8 vote, teeing him up for a future vote on his confirmation by the full Senate.

“Jay Clayton is a highly qualified nominee with a deep experience combatting a wide range of national security threats,†Cotton said in a statement.

“I'm pleased that the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to advance his nomination to be Director of National Intelligence,†he added.

Cotton did not provide a breakdown of how lawmakers voted. The committee is composed of nine Republicans and eight Democrats, and a spokesperson for the Democratic vice-chair, Mark Warner, said he had opposed the nomination.

At his hearing last week, members of the Democratic minority criticized Clayton, a former Wall Street attorney who served as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), for refusing to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. He also faced questions about previous statements he made echoing Trump's claim that US elections have been marred by fraud, and concerns about politicization at the office of the DNI, which serves to coordinate the nation's intelligence agencies.

At the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was asked by senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat and veteran who previously taught economics and international relations at West Point, whether Iran can be deterred and defeated by “air strikes aloneâ€.

“I think, academically, as you look across the totality of history, air power's got limits, and we always have to be mindful of those,†Caine responded.

He went on to say that the US is combing military power with “the totality of the diplomatic, informational and economic†measures. “There's a loot of that work going on, sir,†Trump's hand-picked joint chiefs chair added.

Reed then asked if Caine anticipates the next step in escalation: ground troops.

“Sir, I think it would be unhelpful for me to opine on hypotheticals,†Caine replied. He added that the Pentagon's job was to develop military options, and understand the risks associated with them. “My main job is to always ensure that leaders understand those options and the risks,†Caine added.