Duckworth Bill Targets Pentagon's Split Iran Casualty Counts

Senate Democrats led by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., were set to introduce legislation Thursday that would bar the Pentagon from resetting a war's casualty count by reclassifying the dead and wounded under new operational labels.

The bill follows a change in how the Defense Department publicly accounts for American casualties in the ongoing war with Iran. ABC News first reported last month that the Pentagon had begun shifting casualties into a broad new category labeled "Overseas Operations" rather than maintaining a single cumulative tally.

According to a U.S. official, the new category covers all U.S. military deaths and injuries across the area of responsibility of U.S. Central Command since July 7 — a region that includes the Middle East, Egypt and parts of Central and South Asia — rather than isolating casualties from the Iran conflict. That separates the new figures from the tally kept earlier in the war. Acting Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez attributed the changes at the time to technical issues.

As of Thursday morning, 18 U.S. troops had been killed and at least 689 wounded since the war began in February. Duckworth's bill would require the Pentagon to merge all casualty records for the war into a single count and to notify the next of kin of those killed about the corrections.

Duckworth, an Army helicopter pilot who lost both legs and suffered damage to her right arm in the Iraq War, said she no longer trusts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to be forthcoming. "I don't have the confidence in the Pentagon, and Hegseth in particular, being honest with the American people," she told ABC News.

The accounting change stems from the Trump administration's position that Operation Epic Fury ended in May and that the resumption of daily fighting on July 7 began a new phase, resetting the 60-day limit on waging war without congressional approval under the War Powers Resolution.

Katherine Yon Ebright, a war powers expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, called that a "legal fiction to get around the clear constraints of the War Powers Resolution," while cautioning that the public database is inherently imperfect. Scott Anderson of the Brookings Institution said that "at no point since February 28 have U.S. troops not been engaged in hostilities."

House Oversight Committee Democrats, including ranking member Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., and Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, have demanded a complete record of every modification to the casualty database by Aug. 18. The Pentagon has not held a formal press briefing on the war since early May.

The bill is cosponsored by 13 other Democratic senators, among them John Hickenlooper, Elizabeth Warren, Mark Kelly and John Fetterman.