Tipsheet

TIME Suddenly Cares About What We're Spending on Operation Epic Fury

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  March 17, 2026 10:30 AM

The Left has no problem with spending, right up until a Republican does it. Then, suddenly, they all turn into Ebenezer Scrooge, meticulously counting every penny and lamenting what that money could have been spent on (read: their preferred wasteful social programs).

They did that most recently with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, when they learned he fed the troops steak and lobster (spoiler alert: so did Biden and Obama).

Now TIME, which has no shame, is sharing all the ways that the money spent on stopping the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism from getting nuclear weapons could have been spent.

We do not despise them enough.

Here's what they want that money spent on, which conveniently happens to align with their policy agendas:

"$11.3 billion would have fully funded the training of 100,000 new nurses to solve our staffing crisis,” added Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado in a social media post. “Instead, it was spent in just six days on an illegal war with no endgame.”

Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee made a similar argument, writing that the Trump Administration had spent nearly $12 billion on an “open-ended war of choice in the Middle East” while allocating “zero dollars to lower your healthcare costs.”

Here are some of the ways the $12 billion already spent on the Iran war could have been used, based on publicly available data.

The billions already spent on the war could finance health coverage for more than a million Americans. Federal data show that the government spent about $9,100 per Medicaid enrollee per year in 2023. At that rate, the roughly $12 billion the United States has spent on the conflict so far could cover the costs of a full year of health insurance for about 1.3 million people, a population roughly the size of Dallas, Tex.

...

The average benefit under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was $177 per person per month, or $2,124 per year, in 2023. Using those figures, $12 billion would cover a full year of food assistance to about 5.5 million Americans, which is roughly 13% of all SNAP recipients, or a little over a month of SNAP benefits for all Americans currently enrolled in the program. Alternatively, the billions of dollars could be used to finance hundreds of millions of public school breakfasts and lunches for students nationwide.

TIME also said it could provide "housing assistance" for one million Americans, fund the entire National Park Service, give "free" childcare and pre-K for 900,000 kids, and train more than 100,000 teachers and nurses.

They also said it could go to "foreign and humanitarian aid," as if freeing the world of a nuclear Iran and the Iranian people of a regime that's killed tens of thousands of them doesn't qualify.

They're doing a bang up job.

And now it seems fraud in California is going to outstrip Minnesota. Yet you'll never see TIME write a story about all the things the fraud in those states or the spending on Ukraine.

California Rep. Kevin Kiley called for an investigation into California fraud, saying the state had at least $32 billion in unemployment insurance fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic, $24 billion on homeless initiatives between 2019 and 2024, and now billions in hospice fraud. Some estimates say the state lost $250 billion to fraud.

In Minnesota, the fraud is in excess of $9 billion. And — to date — the U.S. has sent $174 billion to Ukraine.

Where's that article, TIME?

Additionally, in 2023, the U.S. spent $150 billion on illegal immigrants — ten times the amount spent on Iran. That's another article that somehow didn't get published in TIME.

No, no. That's (D)ifferent.