There is a question that tends to get buried under the noise of political debate, the kind of question that sounds simple but carries enormous weight once you sit with it: Why can we always find money for war, but never for the people living in it?
I am not speaking rhetorically. The numbers are real, and they demand a reckoning.
For years, Americans have been told, in one form or another, that the country simply cannot afford universal healthcare, a serious national response to homelessness, or meaningful expansions of Medicare, Medicaid, and VA benefits. The standard explanation involves some combination of deficit concerns, a lack of sufficient tax revenue, and the staggering projected cost of programs like Medicare for All. Those arguments deserve honest engagement; they are not entirely without merit. Estimates for a single-payer Medicare for All system run roughly $28 to $32 trillion over a decade, representing a significant increase in federal costs, even accounting for the redirection of private spending. That is real money, and real tradeoffs are involved in how to raise it. Critics on the right and center point to those numbers as a conversation-ender.
But here is what those same critics rarely mention: a single-payer universal healthcare system is likely to produce savings equivalent to more than $450 billion annually, because the administrative complexity and waste embedded in our current multi-payer system is extraordinarily expensive. The debate, in other words, is not quite as simple as “we can’t afford it.” It is more honestly framed as “we haven’t chosen to pay for it.” And that distinction matters enormously right now, because we are, in fact, choosing to pay for something else.
On February 28, 2026, the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint military campaign with Israel targeting Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure. The operation is ongoing, and its financial costs are staggering.
According to analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the war cost the United States approximately $3.7 billion in its first 100 hours alone, or roughly $891 million per day. That figure has only grown. The Pentagon burned through $5.6 billion worth of munitions in just the first two days of the assault, according to three U.S. officials, a figure that has deepened alarm on Capitol Hill. More recent estimates are even more sobering: according to figures published by the New York Times, the United States is spending approximately $1.43 billion per day on the conflict, comprising roughly $6 billion in operations and $4 billion in munitions across the first phase of the campaign.
To put that in terms that feel human rather than merely statistical: at $1.43 billion per day, every week of this war costs $10 billion, and every month costs approximately $43 billion.
And critically, most of these costs are entirely unbudgeted. CSIS confirmed that $3.5 billion of the first $3.7 billion spent was not included in any existing appropriation, meaning Congress has not approved the spending, no supplemental bill has passed, and the White House is funding a major military campaign through executive action. The Pentagon has yet to ask Congress for a supplemental spending bill for the operation, even as analysts warn that the cost of the Iraq War ultimately approached $3 trillion, and this conflict could reach similar or greater scale.
Now let me offer some comparisons, because context is everything.
The federal government spent $988 billion on Medicare in 2025, and $691 billion on Medicaid and CHIP combined, for a total exceeding $1.8 trillion on federal health programs. Those are large numbers; they fund programs that serve tens of millions of Americans, and they are projected to grow. Expanding those programs to cover more citizens — including veterans who fall outside current eligibility, uninsured adults, and the working poor — would cost more. But the conversation about that cost looks very different when you hold it against $1.43 billion per day flowing into a war with no defined endpoint and no congressional authorization.
The federal investment in addressing homelessness is a fraction of that daily military expenditure. Congress appropriated $129 million for the Education for Homeless Children and Youth program, allowing roughly one in five school districts to receive dedicated funding. The entire targeted federal homelessness budget across agencies runs in the low billions annually. Meanwhile, homelessness in America reached its highest recorded level in 2024, with more than 771,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January, an 18 percent increase from the previous year. We are not funding our way out of that crisis. We are, in fact, cutting our way deeper into it. The current administration’s FY2026 budget proposal seeks to zero out programs like the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program and eliminate dedicated mental health and substance use funding that has contributed to a 27 percent decrease in overdose deaths from 2023 to 2024.
For public education, the picture is similarly grim. The EHCY program for homeless students costs less than one percent of total federal K-12 education spending, yet the president’s FY2026 proposal would roll it into a broader block grant while cutting total funding for those combined programs by 70 percent, from $6.5 billion to $2 billion. A single day of Operation Epic Fury costs more than the entire annual federal investment in educating children experiencing homelessness.
I want to be careful here, because I am not making the argument that military force is never justified, or that Iran’s nuclear ambitions present no legitimate security concerns. Those are genuinely complicated questions that reasonable people can debate across a wide spectrum of opinion. What I am arguing is something more specific and, I think, harder to dismiss: the claim that we “cannot afford” healthcare, housing programs, and educational investment is simply not a factual statement. It is a political choice, dressed up as an economic inevitability.
Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, noted that the conflict is “taking away from other policies that could make life more affordable for Americans,” and she is not wrong. The money is there. It has always been there. The question is where we choose to send it.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in the days after the operation began showed dismal approval ratings among the American public, even as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared from the Pentagon that forces would be “accelerating.” The people, it seems, are asking the same question that is worth asking here: Who authorized this, and what, exactly, are we trading away to pay for it?
The answer, measured in daily burn rates and unbudgeted munitions, is becoming harder to ignore.
Sources: Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Mark Cancian and Chris Park (March 2026); Washington Post (March 9, 2026); CNN Politics (March 6, 2026); Al Jazeera (March 3 and March 9, 2026); European Business Magazine (March 2026); Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget; PMC/National Library of Medicine; Yale School of Public Health / Lancet; National Alliance to End Homelessness; SchoolHouse Connection; Brookings Institution; Costs of War, Brown University.
A note on this post: I try to be transparent about the fact that I am an educator writing from a perspective shaped by years in public schools, not a policy analyst or economist. I hold opinions here, but I have tried to ground them in current, sourced data. If you disagree with my conclusions, I would genuinely welcome the conversation; that is, after all, what civic education is supposed to produce.
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