Pete Hegseth Gives Suspiciously Low Estimate of Total Cost of Iran War

Donald Trump’s war is projected to cost much, much more.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just lowballed the Iran war to the tune of about $62.5 billion.

Hegseth, alongside officials including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee Tuesday to update lawmakers on the state of the war and to request nearly $88 billion more for “urgent needs” in the war effort.

About 15 minutes into Hegseth’s testimony, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin asked if he had a new estimate for how much the war in Iran has cost so far.

“Senator, the estimate we have as of today is $37.5 billion,” the defense secretary replied.

In reality, both U.S. intelligence officials and independent analysts are putting the total cost of the war upward of $100 billion. That’s at least $62.5 billion more than Hegseth claimed.

“It’s my understanding that this whole supplemental funding request is $87.6 billion,” Durbin continued. “We are told the Department of Defense still has $75 billion in un-obligated funding from last year’s reconciliation package. Is that true?”

Hegseth stammered about his predecessor, Lloyd Austin, and replied that he couldn’t offer “specific numbers” as to where that extra $75 billion in defense spending had gone.

At the start of the month, Popular Information’s Stephen Semler published an independent review of U.S. expenses in the war so far, including $28 billion in mobilization, administrative, and immediate combat costs; $46.7 billion on missiles, interceptors, and bombs; $20.3 billion on damaged or destroyed military assets; $2.9 billion on Israel’s bombs and interceptors; and an additional $4.8 billion on war costs to nonmilitary U.S. agencies. Put that together, and you have a whopping $102.7 billion—not counting repairs and replacements for the 42 U.S. aircrafts that have been lost, damaged, or destroyed.

Hegseth’s testimony came only days after the U.S. military announced the deaths of at least three more American service members in the war, bringing the official death toll to 17. (A fourth service member is still missing.) The secretary is calling the request for more funding part of his national defense strategy, “peace through strength.”

The Trump administration’s war in Iran is wildly unpopular, and Republicans know it. Maybe Hegseth thinks lowballing the price tag will distract the American people with a discount rate.

Taylor Farms Backtracks After Trying to Hide Role in Diarrhea Outbreak

Taylor Farms initially claimed the FDA apologized for reporting what turned out to be a false positive test on its iceberg lettuce.

Taylor Farms must be very sorry to have ever claimed that the Food and Drug Administration apologized to them.

The pro-Trump produce supplier deleted all mentions on social media of the aforementioned penitence following a false positive by the FDA that incorrectly identified some of Taylor Farms’ products as a source of the cyclospora outbreak that has caused explosive diarrhea across the country.

In statements since scrubbed from social platforms, the vegetable company said Monday that the FDA had “apologized” for the error.

That set off the federal government, which initiated a typhoon of P.R. damage control that has since been described by agriculture journalists as a “public health communications nightmare.”

On Monday, the FDA denied that it had offered the company any such apology. And in its own since-deleted post, the Department of Health and Human Services asserted that Taylor Farms’ statement “DOES NOT change the basis for FDA’s ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms.”

“Epidemiological evidence and traceback analysis provide strong, actionable public health evidence,” HHS shared Tuesday afternoon, responding to a CNN report that........

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