The War Clock Never Stopped

U.S. service members have been killed and injured in Iranian strikes across the Middle East. Beneath the human toll are immense economic costs. The Defense Department estimates the war has cost nearly $40 billion — almost certainly an undercount. Gas prices are back above $4 per gallon. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is at a standstill. The war with Iran has intensified over the past several weeks, after the U.S. and Iran escalated their strikes. The Trump administration wants Congress to believe that this is because we’re in a new, distinct conflict with Iran, only a few weeks old. In the administration’s telling, hostilities between the U.S. and Iran “terminated” from early April to mid-July, then started afresh after Iran attacked commercial ships.

That story is nonsense. It is belied by simple reality and by the administration’s own rhetoric. Hostilities with Iran have been ongoing since the U.S. started the war in late February. And this is more than a matter of semantics. As we’ve written before, federal law places specific, time-bound constraints on presidents’ ability to use military force. Despite the administration’s attempts to wave away the existence of this war, those constraints never stopped applying —which means the country is still being subjected to a war that grows more illegal by the day.

The specific time limits at issue are laid out in the War Powers Resolution, a 1973 law designed to prevent presidents from dragging the country into endless foreign conflicts and usurping Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war. The statute gives presidents limited authority to use the military to respond to imminent threats without first obtaining specific authorization from Congress, and it limits those hostilities to 60 days unless Congress explicitly approves.

We last analyzed the administration’s claim about the war powers clock on the cusp of the Iran war’s 60-day threshold. At that point, in late April, the administration had already been claiming that the ceasefire President Donald Trump announced earlier that month meant that hostilities were over and the clock had stopped. We rejected that characterization at the time, on the grounds that the Navy had continued to enforce a blockade — which is considered an act of war, even by the government’s own standards — and Trump was threatening to resume firing at any moment.

The analysis today is the same. While the administration continues to claim the war ended in April before restarting, the facts on the ground have continued to undermine any claims of peace. On May 4, the U.S. Navy sank several Iranian boats, while Iran fired at U.S. ships. Both countries continued to launch strikes, both on land and at sea, throughout May and the first half of June.

The signing of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the two countries on June 17 did not change the status quo, either. While the memorandum purported to “declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts,” it was explicitly an interim agreement pending a permanent peace deal and, in reality, it resulted in just over a week without military strikes. Despite the rhetoric in the agreement, the actual situation was little different from the earlier ceasefire, which also featured intermittent lulls and flares of strikes.

Less than two weeks after the agreement was signed, Iran fired at ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. launched multiple days of strikes against Iran, prompting Iran to attack U.S. bases in the area. Congress clearly did not view the MOU as a transition to peacetime either, as the Senate voted on June 23 to approve a House resolution directing an end to hostilities.

On July 10, the administration notified Congress of what it deemed a new state of hostilities. But as the record shows, there had never been a durable end to hostilities, so the war powers clock never actually reset.

In fact, the administration has been happy to ignore much longer breaks in fighting when it has been convenient. In late April, the State Department’s legal advisor published a memo that claimed the U.S. had been in an “ongoing” conflict with Iran “for years and, at the very least, since June 2025.” In making that claim, the memo quoted the Department of Defense Law of War Manual, which emphasizes that “hostilities end when opposing parties decide to end hostilities and actually do so.” If the administration decided that the months of relative stability between June 2025 and February 2026 did not satisfy this threshold, it is hard to imagine that the nine days that elapsed between the signing of the memorandum and renewed strikes qualify either.

It’s critical to name an illegal war for what it is — and to put an end to it. Unfortunately, this sort of gambit with the war powers clock is not unprecedented. As an analysis by Tess Bridgeman and Brian Finucane detailed, presidents from both parties, including Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, have tried to get around the 60-day clock by reporting individual uses of force within a longer-running conflict as standalone episodes of hostilities. That history doesn’t excuse the current administration; it adds to the urgency of the current moment. If the Iran war becomes the latest data point that presidents can cite to circumvent the law when it comes to war, the next instance could be even more deadly and costly. As we wrote back in April, the history of presidential war powers has been “a one-way ratchet of emboldened presidents and a weakened Congress.”

The refusal to name this war for what it is brings human costs, as well. The Washington Post recently reported that the Defense Department recategorized the deaths of four service members that occurred since July 7 as the result of “overseas operations” rather than Operation Epic Fury. It placed over 200 wounded troops in the same category, a move that could affect their care and benefits.

Those service members died in a war — a war that started in February and that since has been defined by continuous hostilities, violated ceasefires, and an administration daring Congress to question its claims.

There are signs that Congress will not accept the administration’s sleight of hand. The House of Representatives has already voted, for a second time, to direct Trump to end hostilities. The Senate rejected a similar measure for now, but the margin was razor thin. If a few more members of Congress find their nerve, that outcome could change. That could not only curtail the administration’s ability to fight a war while insisting the country is at peace; it could restore the decision over whether to go to war to Congress and the people of the United States, where it belongs.