Letters from an American - Democratic Senators and Members of Congress Condemn Lack of Planning, Cuts in Services, and Reckless Spending

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

March 10, 2026Administration gives a classified briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senators express frustration with the insistence that information is not being made available to the American people, Senators protest decisions to wage war being made without Congress, The Framers of the Constitution put the power to declare war in the hands of Congress, $1 Billion is being spent each day of the war in Iran, Defense Department squanders money on frivolous items, President Eisenhower called for America to move away from militarization and to invest in actions that support health and prosperity for all.Watch today's recording here: https://www.youtube.com/live/g9TUa1Rwd6U?si=T8_KKcHQZElhpnZ-Get full, free access to Letters from an American here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribeYou can also find me:Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathercoxrichardson/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heathercoxrichardson Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

March 10th, 26. Today, administration officials gave a classified briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the war in Iran. Democrats, who spoke to the press afterward, appeared to be furious. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut, told reporters he was coming out of the briefing, as dissatisfied and angry, frankly, as I have from any past briefing in my 15 years in the Senate. I'm left with more questions than answers, especially about the cost of the war. My questions have been unanswered, and I will demand answers because the American people deserve to know. I am most concerned about the threat to American lives of potentially deploying our sons and daughters on the ground in Iran. We seem to be on a path toward deploying

American troops on the ground in Iran. And there is also, as disturbingly as anything else, the specter of active Russian aid to Iran, putting in danger American lives. Literally, Russia seems to be aiding our enemy, actively and intensively, with intelligence and perhaps with other means, and China also may be assisting Iran. So the American people deserve to know much more than this administration has told them about the cost of the war, the danger to our sons and daughters in uniform, and the potential for further escalation and widening of this war, a war of choice made by this president, not chosen by the American people, with potentially huge consequences to American lives. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, noted on social media that the administration

appears to have no goals for the war except continued bombing, and no plan for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Senator Jackie Rosen, a Democrat of Nevada, was obviously frustrated that the administration is giving out information only under the cloak of classified briefings, making it hard for elected officials to communicate with their constituents about the war. We've been calling over and over again for them to come out of the classified briefings, to allow us to have these conversations as much as we can in an open setting, not just with the press, but with the American people and with our constituents, with our men and women who serve in the military, with their families who are waiting home for them. While it is solely the responsibility of the United

States Congress to declare war, she said, she called the time. to Trump's frequent use of the word war, to suggest Republicans are hiding his seizing of that power by claiming Trump's attacks on Iran do not fall under that constitutional provision. Make no mistake, she said. This is Trump's war. He says it every day, and he wants to go any further.

He needs to come out and have this discussion with Congress and the American people. What I heard is not necessarily just concerning, Rosen said. It is disturbing, and I'm not sure what the endgame is or what their plans are. She said Trump has not shown to this Congress, to me, or I believe, to us in our classified briefing, any plans for what he wants to do for the day after. She warned that Trump could not simply stop the war and have everything go back to the way it was on February 27th. The Middle East has sustained too much damage.

You see the bombs. You see the destruction. It's not going to stop just because he wishes it to be so. A key reason the framers of the Constitution put the power to declare war in the hands of Congress, rather than the executive, was that they were all too familiar with the history of European kings who had launched wars of choice that had reduced their subjects to poverty under crushing war taxes. They feared that the same thing could happen in their new country, that supporting an army would cost tax dollars, impoverishing the citizens of the new nation. If the debate over war went to Congress, voters could hear the reasoning for the war, hashed out, and decide for themselves if the cost in lives and treasure was worth it to them. And, after they voted for a war, members of Congress would have to answer to their constituents.

for the money they spent and the lives lost. That argument is potent again almost 250 years later. Democrats are calling out that Trump is spending a billion dollars a day in his attacks on Iran, but that he slashed through government programs that help Americans, claiming the need to address the country's ballooning national debt. Just yesterday, Berkeley Lovelace Jr. of NBC, News reported that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administration official overseeing the Affordable Care Act, says that many of those enrolled in health care under the law should not be there.

About 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage this year, down by more than 1.2 million from last year. Oz anticipates cutting another 4 million off the rolls as he targets waste, fraud, and abuse. And yet, as Ellie Quinlan Howdling of the New Republic noted last night, according to a report from government watchdog open the books, the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Heggzeth, blew through $93.4 billion in September 2025 alone, with more than $50 billion going out in the last five days of the month alone. To spend the entirety of the defense budget rather than lose it,

Pentagon officials bought a $98,3299-Syneway and Sun's Grand Piano for the Air Force Chief of Staff's Home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan King Crab, and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth's Pentagon. The department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October. In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for rib-eye steaks, again just in September. $124,000 for ice cream machines and $139,224 on 272 orders of donuts.

In October, howdling noted, the administration said it could not fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, because the government had shut down. millions of Americans lost food benefits. Representative Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat of New Mexico, reposted Howdling's article and commented, You better believe we'll be investigating. Democratic Texas State Representative James Tallerico, who was running for the U.S. Senate,

expressed his concerns about the Iran War on CBS mornings yesterday. As a millennial, I saw how Millarillo, I saw how military disasters like the Iraq War robbed this nation of young lives, of billions of dollars, of our moral standing in the world, and I worry that our current leaders are repeating those same mistakes, he said.

I was in Sand Branch, Texas, which is a community south of Dallas that doesn't have running water. It doesn't have basic sewer infrastructure, he continued. So every dollar we spend bombing people in the Middle East is a dollar we're not spending in Sand Branch, Texas, or in our communities here at home. We're always told that we don't have enough money for schools

or for health care or for our veterans, but there's always enough money to bomb people on the other side of the world. And so we can support the democracy movement in Iran. We can prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, all without bombing innocent school children or sending our American troops off to die on the other side of the world.

Talariko was channeling a Texas-born Republican from the post-World War two years, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In early March, 1953, soon after he took office, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died, and Eisenhower jumped at the chance to reset the militarization of the Cold War.

All people hunger for peace and fellowship and justice, he said in his speech to newspaper editors, and he deplored the growing arms race with the USSR. Even if the two superpowers managed to avoid an atomic war, pouring wealth and energy into armaments would limit their ability to raise up the rest of the world. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense,

a theft from those who hunger, and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The sweat of workers, the genius of scientists, and the hopes of children would be better spent on schools, hospitals, roads, and homes than on armaments. World peace could be achieved, Eisenhower said, not by weapons of war, but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and by timber, and by rice, Extremist Republicans sneered at what they called Eisenhower's stomach theory of diplomacy. But Eisenhower's approach to the world was forged by his horror at what he saw at Ordrouf, the Nazi concentration camp that funneled prisoners to Buchanvald when he commanded the Allies in World War II.

I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world. wrote. He was determined to do all he could to guarantee that such atrocities never happened again. Eisenhower recognized that economically dispossessed people were natural targets for political and religious extremists. They could easily be manipulated by a strong leader to back a cause, any cause, that promised to resurrect a world in which they had enjoyed prosperity and cultural significance. Such extremism had been dangerous enough in the hands of the Nazis, but 1945 gave quite specific shape to Eisenhower's fears. The atomic bomb, unleashed by the United States over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in summer 1945,

changed the meaning of human conflict. If a charismatic, political, or religious extremist roused a dispossed population behind another war, and if that leader got his hands on a nuclear weapon, he could destroy the world. Promoting economic prosperity and better standards of living at home and around the world was not just about peace or justice, Eisenhower thought.

It was about saving man. Kind. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.