One of the worst kept secrets in Washington is no one actually knows just how much money the United States has spent in support of Ukraine.
Over the past year conservatives in Congress have been pushing President Joe Biden and his administration for the real number, and they're finally getting some answers.
Roger Marshall, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and twelve other members of Congress, chronicled the immense difficulty Congress has had in getting what should be readily available information from the Biden administration.
When Vance and other conservatives in Congress started pressing the Biden administration to provide the real cost of the Ukraine war in January 2023, the lawmakers estimated the U.S. had spent "a minimum of $114 billion." Now, with added information from the OMB, Vance and company estimate the current total of aid to Ukraine amounts to at least $125 billion-$14 billion over what the OMB had previously claimed.
Conservatives believe the Biden administration could give Ukraine around another $4 billion in the form of weapons transfers from U.S. stockpiles under the presidential drawdown authority.
When OMB got to responding to lawmakers' January 2023 letter almost eight months later, the OMB claimed, through an opaque and admittedly incomplete data sheet, that Ukraine aid totaled $111 billion.
"The deficiencies in OMB's response were numerous," the Tuesday letter to Young said of the OMB's September 2023 response.
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