Dispatches on war,
power, and who pays the price

The House and Senate subcommittees overseeing defense spending are holding back-to-back hearings today to review the Trump administration's FY2027 military budget proposal of $1.5 trillion — the largest defense budget in American history by a substantial margin. The previous FY26 enacted figure was approximately $895 billion. The FY27 proposal represents a roughly 68% year-over-year increase.

Context for the scale: $1.5 trillion would exceed the combined military spending of the next ten countries in the world. It would represent approximately 13% of all projected federal revenue and substantially more than the combined budgets of every cabinet department other than HHS and Treasury. The proposal comes in the same week that Trump is pushing to suspend the federal gas tax — eliminating $3.5 billion per month in Highway Trust Fund revenue while the same administration proposes a $605 billion year-over-year defense increase.

What's getting buried: The hearings today are framed in mainstream coverage as procedural subcommittee work — a routine appropriations cycle item — rather than as the historic budget event they actually are. The $1.5 trillion figure is being normalized through a process structure that prevents it from becoming a single news event. This is how unprecedented budget shifts become invisible: by being distributed across procedural events that individually look routine.

Brown University's Iran War Energy Cost Tracker released figures yesterday showing that American consumers have absorbed $37 billion in additional energy costs since the Iran war began on February 28 — equivalent to $284 per US household. The tracker compares actual prices since February 28 against a counterfactual "no-war" baseline. The increase in gasoline prices alone accounts for $20 billion of consumer losses. Diesel — critical for farmers, truckers, and rail — is now just 18 cents below the all-time high set in 2022.

The administration's response, finalized yesterday in a CBS News interview: Trump confirmed he wants to suspend the federal gas tax — an 18.4-cent-per-gallon levy that funds 85% of the Highway Trust Fund. Senator Josh Hawley announced he will introduce suspension legislation. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida announced she will introduce a parallel House bill. Suspension would cost the federal government roughly $3.5 billion per month. An 18.4-cent suspension would reduce pump prices from $4.52 to approximately $4.34 — still $1.36 above the pre-war $2.98 baseline. Most of the $284-per-household cost would remain unrecovered.

The structural argument being buried: The Brown data quantifies a self-inflicted cost. The Trump administration chose to start the Iran war on February 28. The war disrupted Strait of Hormuz tanker traffic. The disruption produced the gas price spike. The price spike is being used to justify suspending the gas tax — which produces a structural transfer from the Highway Trust Fund (already projected to collapse by FY2028) to consumers or oil-industry margins. The administration's foreign policy choice produced the crisis the administration is now proposing to "solve" by gutting infrastructure funding.

On Sunday, the Israeli Knesset's Ministerial Committee on Legislation backed a bill that would formally repeal the 1993 Oslo Accords — the cornerstone agreement that created the Palestinian Authority and remains the legal foundation of international policy on the Israeli-Palestinian question for over three decades. The bill was introduced by far-right parliamentarian Limor Son Har-Melech, who was explicit about the intent: "We promised to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and now it is time to encourage settlement in Areas A and B and cancel the disastrous Oslo Accords."

What this means in practice: Areas A and B are the portions of the West Bank where the Palestinian Authority has full or partial administrative control under Oslo. The bill would legally enable settlement construction in those areas — making the two-state framework not just politically unviable but legally repealed under Israeli law. On Friday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the same thing more bluntly while overseeing the uprooting of 3,000 Palestinian-planted trees: "We are building the Land of Israel and destroying the idea of a Palestinian state."

The accompanying field data: Per UN OCHA, at least 44 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank in 2026 so far, including 13 by settlers. More than 760 settler attacks have been documented this year — averaging six per day. Some 2,000 Palestinians, nearly 900 of them children, have been displaced in 2026 by settler violence and access restrictions alone. March 2026 recorded the highest monthly settler injury toll since OCHA began documenting in 2006. While American media coverage focuses on the Iran war and the Trump-Xi summit lead-up, the legal framework underlying 32 years of international Israeli-Palestinian policy is being dismantled in the Knesset, and the field facts on the ground are racing ahead of the legal repeal.