WASHINGTON — Lawmakers in the U.S. Senate are taking aim at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget, looking to cut off a portion of those funds unless the Pentagon delivers several investigations it has been sitting on — most notably one involving a deadly strike on an Iranian elementary school at the start of the U.S.-Israeli war.
The new restrictions were written into this year’s annual defense authorization bill, filed earlier this week. Under the legislation, no more than 25% of the defense secretary’s office travel funds can be used until Hegseth turns over what the bill calls “unredacted civilian harm investigations,” including a probe into the February 28, 2026, strike on the Minab school. Officials have said preliminarily that the United States was responsible for that strike, which has been attributed to outdated intelligence.
Congress, which is responsible for overseeing Pentagon operations, has not yet received the completed investigation. It is believed the report was finished last month.
Sen. Jack Reed, the leading Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, released a statement saying this year’s defense package “forces the Secretary to be more accountable to Congress and will prevent many errors of the past from being repeated in the future.”
The strike on the elementary school occurred on the opening day of the U.S. military campaign against Iran and resulted in the deaths of more than 165 people, a large number of them children. The school was located next to a Revolutionary Guard base, and the incident quickly became one of the most controversial moments of the conflict.
People familiar with the early findings, released in March, said outdated intelligence most likely caused the United States to carry out the missile attack. If confirmed, the strike would rank among the most deadly civilian casualty events tied to American military action in the past two decades.
Senators on both sides of the aisle inserted the travel fund restrictions into the National Defense Authorization Act as a way to compel the release of the findings. The bill text specifies that the cap applies until the secretary submits the investigations along with “all relevant supporting documents” covering multiple civilian harm incidents.
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
Beyond the Iran school strike, senators are also calling for the Pentagon to release unedited video footage of U.S. military strikes on boats near Venezuela that were allegedly involved in drug trafficking.
The Pentagon has carried out a campaign lasting several months, striking vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. At least 211 people have been killed in those operations so far. The military has publicized some of the strikes by posting selected video clips on social media. In at least one case, people who survived an initial strike were later killed in follow-up attacks — something military law experts say conflicts with established rules of engagement. Lawmakers had pushed for similar video disclosures in last year’s defense bill as well.
Senators are additionally requesting three separate investigations into a set of strikes carried out in Yemen in April 2025, during the U.S. military’s campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who had been targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Among the incidents under scrutiny is a strike on a port that left at least 70 people dead and more than 170 wounded, as well as a strike on a residential area in Sanaa — the rebel-controlled capital of Yemen — that hit a house and killed at least four people while wounding 16 others. Those casualty numbers were reported by the Houthis.
At the time of those strikes, U.S. Central Command declined to answer questions about them directly. After the port strike, the command said the operation “was not intended to harm the people of Yemen” and argued it was meant to “eliminate this source of fuel for the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists and deprive them of illegal revenue that has funded Houthi efforts to terrorize the entire region for over 10 years.”
All of the requested reports are to be delivered to the Armed Services committees in both the House and Senate.
The provisions are part of the National Defense Authorization Act, a wide-ranging 1,500-page policy document that sets the direction for the military in the coming year. The bill is put together with input from both Republicans, who hold the Senate majority, and Democrats in the minority — making it one of the rare pieces of legislation that routinely passes with bipartisan support.
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved the measure last week, and the full Senate is expected to take it up for a vote.
