Obama to seek more money for ISIS fight

President Obama is expected to send Congress a request for more money for the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as early as Friday, according to congressional aides. 

House Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Jennifer Hing said a request would soon be sent to Congress, but the panel has not seen details yet. 

{mosads}Administration officials would not confirm the request’s timing or the amount the president is expected to ask for, although Bloomberg News reported that the president will ask for $3.2 billion.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters to “stay tuned” adding that “additional resources may be necessary.”

“The option of seeking additional resources to make sure that our men and women had the support that they need to carry out this campaign is something that the president’s been focused on for quite some time,” Earnest continued. “It’s something that has been the subject of a lot of the discussions the president has had with his national security team.”

The request is expected to be an amendment to the $58.6 billion overseas contingency operations (OCO) request for fiscal 2015. That’s the Pentagon’s war-funding account that has paid for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even with a $3.2 billion addition, the full request would be much smaller than the $85 billion OCO amount the Pentagon had access to for fiscal 2014, which ended Sept. 30.

The Pentagon’s 2015 defense budget is expected to be passed in December, or next year, when newly elected members of Congress take office. The OCO request, however, could be approved in a separate spending bill.

The money would partly be spent on munitions used in airstrikes against ISIS, and could provide at least $500 million to train and equip Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in Iraq, according to Bloomberg. 

In September, Congress approved an authorization to train and equip Syrian rebels, but it didn’t authorize funding because the United States said coalition partners would first fund the program.  

The Pentagon has estimated the fight against ISIS has cost an average of $8.3 million a day since Aug. 8, when the U.S. began airstrikes against the group in Iraq. 

On Oct. 28, the Pentagon estimated the total cost to be $580 million since Aug. 8., but the National Priorities Project — a group that tracks federal spending — estimated that the cost of the war had already crossed the $1 billion mark.

The Pentagon has not been clear about the total amount spent on military operations since mid-June, when President Obama first authorized U.S. troops to deploy to the region to help advise Iraqi forces on the Islamic group. 

A September report from the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimated the war could cost between $2.4 billion and $22 billion per year depending on a possible escalation.

This story was updated at 1:24 p.m.

— Justin Sink contributed.