The midterm election results handed Democrats both chambers of Congress. Leaders in both parties have attributed much of the result to voter discontent with President Donald Trump’s foreign policy choices on Iran and tariffs, in large part because of their downstream consequences for the cost of living in the United States—the prices of gasoline, diesel, and groceries above all. Vice President JD Vance even blamed the Iran war for his party’s losses.
Democratic leaders have read the result the same way, and they have been unusually specific about their foreign policy aims. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) listed ending the Iran war and stopping the tariffs alongside Medicaid cuts and restoring the Affordable Care Act credits as the House’s first orders of business. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters that the Senate’s priority was to bring down the cost of living and that his party intended to end the war. Behind these Democratic leaders stand committee chairs-in-waiting—Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) at Senate Foreign Relations, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) at House Foreign Affairs, and Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) at the House appropriations subcommittee that funds the State Department—who have been more granular still.
The harder questions concern the methods by which a Democratic majority is likely to address its foreign policy priorities. Assuming the current projections hold, a Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress will still be unable to override Trump’s veto, which the president is likely to exercise against any legislation that would end a war, repeal a tariff authority, or compel the disbursement of impounded aid. The new majority can still refuse to appropriate, along with a host of other tools: it will set the floor agenda, write the appropriations bills, confirm or stall nominees, review arms transfers, and issue subpoenas. Each of those levers has been tested over the past two years, and the lesson is that the majority’s influence will come less from what it can enact than from what it can withhold.
Iran
Ending the Iran war is the clearest commitment made by Democrats. The president launched the war alongside Israel on Feb. 28 without seeking congressional authorization. The administration has said the campaign aims to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile program, end its support for proxy networks, and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. In the eight months since, Democrats in the minority forced roughly two dozen votes under the War Powers Resolution, and the campaign gradually drew Republican votes. In June, the House adopted H.Con.Res. 86 by 215-208, with four Republicans, and the Senate followed, with a vote of 50-48—the first time since 1973 that both chambers had directed a president to remove U.S. forces from hostilities. The administration ignored the directive.
The June measure was a concurrent resolution under Section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, which by design never reaches the president’s desk. Since the Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in INS v. Chadha, the executive branch has treated that mechanism as an unconstitutional legislative veto. The administration has also argued that the April ceasefire “terminated” hostilities for War Powers purposes and stopped the statute’s 60-day clock, because U.S. and Iranian forces were no longer exchanging fire. Democrats and war powers experts reject that reading, noting that the statute makes no provision for pausing the clock and pointing to the continuing U.S. naval blockade and occasional later exchanges of fire. The alternative, a joint resolution under Section 1013 of the 1983 State Department Authorization Act, is presentment-compliant, which means it is also vetoable. Democrats now hold the majorities needed to pass a joint resolution in both chambers on a simple-majority vote. They do not hold the majorities needed to override the president’s veto.
Democratic leadership has shifted its vocabulary from war powers to appropriations. Schumer invoked the power of the purse explicitly in his post-election remarks and Jeffries has said more vaguely that the Trump administration should not be “trusted with another dime.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) went further before the election, saying that if the war continues into 2027, Congress should not appropriate a dollar for the Defense Department without a requirement that the war end. The administration has asked for a $1.5 trillion defense budget and separate emergency funding for the war’s costs; both now require Democratic votes to pass.
The constitutional footing for a funding limitation is firm, but a rider barring funds for operations against Iran must ride on a bill the president will sign, or on one whose failure the public will blame on him rather than on Congress. The outgoing Congress faces a Dec. 11 funding deadline, and House Democrats are pressing for a full-year bill so that the new majority can start fiscal 2027 on its own terms. Critics on the Democratic Party’s left are already asking whether leadership is prepared to accept a lapse in appropriations to end the war. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) is also backing appropriations hardball, calling on Democrats to block any continuing resolution that keeps funding the Iran war after the current one expires on Dec. 11. Whether a funding lapse is politically palatable is a question to which no one yet knows the answer.
Expect an oversight track to run in parallel. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the presumptive chair of the House Armed Services Committee, set out his committee’s priorities the day after the election, explicitly calling for vigorous oversight of the Pentagon as the first order of business. He named the “illegal war against Iran” as a top priority, and said the committee would pursue investigations through more public testimony from senior officials and a reconstituted Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.
That last item matters more than it sounds. A standing investigative subcommittee with its own staff turns oversight from a series of hearings into a sustained investigative agenda. The list of subjects Smith intends to target—what he calls “sweetheart contracts,” the strikes on suspected drug traffickers at sea, the deployment of troops to American cities, the dismissal of senior officers and the criteria underlying those decisions—shows how far beyond Iran he intends to probe.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine avoided open testimony for the war’s first two months and have since appeared mainly in budget hearings, where members of both parties complained that they could not extract a strategy, a timeline, or a reliable casualty count. A Democratic committee will likely want both back under oath, including testimony on the war’s objectives, its cost, and the decision to launch it. Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, is the obvious witness to discuss targeting (including the opening-day strike that hit a school in Minab, which the Pentagon says remains under investigation) and the on-and-off ceasefire cycle that has characterized the conflict since April. The legal opinions that underpinned the war point to the department’s general counsel and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; the diplomatic record and the battle-damage assessments point to the Secretary of State and the leadership of the Intelligence Community. Democrats can also invite, in a private capacity, the senior officers Hegseth dismissed during the war. Hegseth has described his removals of senior officers as “accountability,” though the Pentagon has not publicly explained most individual dismissals. And Smith has already said he is inclined to support impeachment proceedings against Hegseth, an inquiry that would carry its own compulsory process.
Oversight hearings, and possible impeachment hearings, serve a legal purpose beyond embarrassment. They build the record on which a future Congress can narrow the executive’s claimed Article II authority, and they are the predicate for any serious revision of the War Powers Resolution itself.
Tariffs
On trade, the current tariffs rest on authorities Congress delegated decades ago, and the Supreme Court’s ruling that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize tariffs only redirected the administration to other statutes. Within days of that decision, the president invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974—a balance-of-payments provision never before used in its 50-year history—to impose a 10 percent surcharge on nearly all imports, and has since turned to Section 301 and Section 338 to build a more durable tariff regime.
Democrats have the legislative texts ready. Senate Democrats introduced the Reclaim Trade Powers Act to repeal Section 122 outright. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has a broader framework that would require congressional approval of executive tariffs and of negotiated trade agreements, and a refund bill would direct Customs and Border Protection to return, with interest, every dollar collected under the invalidated IEEPA tariffs. Jeffries has said the House will move a bill to undo the tariffs and reassert Congress’s role in setting import taxes.
None of these bills will become law over a veto. As Pierre Yared, who served on the Trump administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, observed, repealing or constraining delegated tariff authority requires two-thirds of both chambers, and those majorities did not emerge on Nov. 3.
The realistic agenda is likely twofold. First, oversight with an economic edge—hearings on whether importers passed tariff refunds to consumers, on the Section 301 investigations that must precede new duties, and on the trade deals negotiated without congressional approval. Second, the slow institutional work of drafting a trade-authority statute a future president of either party would sign. With their party out of the majority, free-trade Republicans may feel released from loyalty on this issue, and tariff votes are the most plausible place for a bipartisan Article I coalition to form.
The oversight track is also readily apparent. On refunds, Democrats are likely to call Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who called repayment a logistical nightmare the day the Court ruled; Jamieson Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative, to whom Senate Democrats have already written demanding a plan to get the money to consumers; and Rodney Scott, the Customs and Border Protection commissioner whose agency opened its refund portal only in April, litigated against the order to pay, and then deferred the final tranche. On Section 301 and the deals: Greer again, for investigations run on timelines built to replace the invalidated duties, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, for the $550 billion Japanese and $350 billion Korean investment pledges and a tariff-exclusion process Sens. Wyden and Van Hollen have accused of favoritism. The committees investigating will likely be Ways and Means under Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) and Senate Finance under Sen. Wyden.
Ukraine and Russia
Ukraine is the one file on which a Democratic Congress could plausibly legislate over a veto, and Democratic aides have identified a new assistance package as a priority. The administration has largely halted direct financial and military support, but the underlying coalition that supported aid in Congress never collapsed. Meeks, as ranking member, discharged a Ukraine support measure from committee in the last Congress, only to watch it die in the Senate. Reuters’ assessment is that a new aid package would probably attract the two-thirds needed in each chamber, although that judgment may be more fragile than it looks since several of Ukraine’s most committed Republican advocates are leaving.
Sanctions are the second opening. The president signed Russian energy sanctions into law and then, within weeks, waived them and lifted restrictions on Russian diesel. Meeks has a bipartisan bill to block Trump’s diesel plan. More broadly, a Congress that writes sanctions into statute can also write the waiver standards, the reporting requirements, and the review procedures that make waivers costly. The Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017 is the template for such a bill. That Act survived a reluctant president because it passed with veto-proof margins, and it constrained him because it put congressional review between the president and relief.
On Europe more generally, Congress has already shown what it can do. Current statute requires a baseline of 76,000 U.S. troops stationed in Europe, a floor written into a defense authorization bill the president had to sign. Expect similar provisions—on NATO withdrawal, on basing, on intelligence sharing—to be attached to the next National Defense Authorization Act, where the measures will ride on a bill with its own bipartisan constituency.
A president who will not have a friendly Congress to pass his legislative agenda may seek his legacy in a Ukraine settlement, possibly on terms unfavorable to Kyiv, and European security could become part of a broader negotiated arrangement with Moscow.
Israel
No issue divides the new majority more sharply, and none is more likely to be handled in committee rather than on the floor. The president has already announced that he would end assistance to Israel by the end of the year, and it is an open question whether he would veto an aid package or related bills. Nearly half of House Democrats voted this summer to end military aid to Israel. The two leaders did not. Schumer was one of seven Senate Democrats who opposed resolutions in April to block the transfer of D-9 bulldozers and 1,000-pound bombs, and people close to Jeffries say he will avoid Israel votes wherever he can. Between those poles sits the presumed chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Meeks. Meeks has already blocked arms sales from the ranking member’s chair and has supported limits on specific categories of weapons, such as heavy bombs, while opposing a cutoff.
That middle position maps onto a legal agenda that does not require new law at all. Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act prohibits assistance to any government that restricts the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid. The Leahy law bars assistance to security forces credibly implicated in gross violations of human rights. Section 502B conditions security assistance on a government’s human rights record and gives Congress a mechanism to demand a report and to act on it. The Arms Export Control Act requires that U.S.-origin weapons be used for legitimate self-defense and internal security, and Section 36(b) gives either chamber a privileged path to a joint resolution of disapproval for major sales. These provisions are already on the books. What a Democratic majority adds is the willingness to invoke them by demanding the reports and determinations they require.
Several legislative vehicles are also already drafted. The Block the Bombs Act would bar transfers of specified munitions; the Ceasefire Compliance Act, introduced in February, would condition weapons on adherence to the Gaza ceasefire. Committee chairs can place informal holds on proposed sales during the pre-notification review that the State Department conducts with the two foreign affairs committees. The executive honors those held by custom rather than law, and it overrode one in February 2025, when Meeks declined to clear an $8 billion package. Chairs can also demand the end-use monitoring reports and civilian-harm assessments that the executive branch is required to produce. And they can attach reporting requirements to the appropriations bills that carry the $3.8 billion annual baseline for Israel. These steps are less dramatic than a floor vote to cut aid, and they do not require the caucus to resolve its divisions.
The Pentagon
The defense budget is where Democratic leverage is most concrete, because it is the bill the administration most needs. The president requested a 67 percent increase this year, to $1.5 trillion, and Senate Democrats blocked it, citing Trump’s refusal to consult Congress on Iran and his cuts to domestic programs. That fight resumes in January, with Democrats holding the gavels on both armed services and appropriations committees. The likely outcome is a budget ceiling, paired with a redirection away from programs the majority regards as wasteful, including Golden Dome, an ambitious and costly plan for homeland missile defense, and the Golden Fleet, Trump’s plan to build a new fleet of battleships.
One caveat that applies to every appropriations lever here is Russell Vought. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director treats appropriations as ceilings, not mandates, even when Republicans write them. In September, OMB sent Congress an $810 million pocket rescission, a request to cancel funds timed so they expire before Congress can act on it. Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins objected, calling the move an unlawful usurpation of the purse. It came days after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had again found the device illegal. The Impoundment Control Act requires the executive branch to spend money as Congress appropriated it, and Vought has told the Senate he does not consider the law constitutional.
Further, the oversight agenda is longer than the spending agenda, and much of it concerns conduct rather than spending. A wave of Pentagon oversight is expected in 2027 covering contracting, Hegseth’s dismissals of senior officers, the boat strikes against suspected drug traffickers, and the war in Iran.
The boat strikes deserve particular attention from a legal standpoint. For more than a year, U.S. forces have conducted strikes against vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, on the theory that the targets are narco-traffickers engaged in armed conflict with the United States. The administration has told Congress that the cartels it has designated as terrorist organizations are “unlawful combatants,” and that the strikes comply with the law of armed conflict. Most legal commentators reject that theory. In their view, no armed conflict with cartels or traffickers exists, so the strikes are unlawful under both international and domestic law. A Democratic Armed Services Committee can demand the execute orders, rules of engagement, or other operational documents directing the campaign; the legal memoranda; the target-selection criteria; and the casualty assessments. A Democratic Intelligence Committee can examine the intelligence that supported the determination that an armed conflict exists and each of the 72 strikes that followed. The foreign affairs and intelligence committees can probe harm to lawful U.S. counternarcotics efforts because allies have curtailed their intelligence cooperation. The administration will resist, and the resulting confrontation over executive privilege will be an early test of how far the new majority is prepared to push.
Foreign Assistance
The overhaul of American foreign assistance is the issue on which the new majority’s legal grievance is strongest and its practical remedy probably weakest. The administration dissolved USAID, withheld billions in already appropriated aid until the money expired, and moved Food for Peace from USAID to the Agriculture Department. In August 2025, it deployed a so-called pocket rescission to cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid and peacekeeping funds—a maneuver the GAO has said for decades is unlawful under the Impoundment Control Act, which does not permit a president to withhold funds through their expiration date.
Sam Vigersky at the Council on Foreign Relations frames the agenda in three parts: investigating where the administration overstepped, using oversight to keep current officials within the law, and preparing the blueprint for rebuilding foreign assistance under a future administration. The first step is a legal accounting. Congress could ask GAO to issue impoundment findings on every withheld account, document the terminations of grants and contracts that amounted to de facto rescissions, and establish on the record that the executive branch acted outside the statute.
Those findings will not restore the money. They will, however, matter the next time a president tests the Impoundment Control Act, and they will shape whatever amendments Congress makes to close the pocket-rescission gap GAO has flagged since 1975.
The second is appropriations. Frankel, the likely chair of the House subcommittee that funds the State Department, has named humanitarian and development assistance, alliances, and competition with China as her priorities, and she is expected to champion the women’s and girls’ programs the administration eliminated. On the Senate side, the subcommittee chair is unsettled because Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) is seeking the whip’s job, but the fiscal 2026 bill he negotiated with Republicans—restoring global health funding, democracy programs, and dues to international organizations—is the template. The appropriations language must now anticipate evasion: funds should be made available until expended where possible, with explicit anti-deferral provisions and reporting triggers that make quiet non-obligation visible.
The third is institutional. The administration has trimmed the Foreign Service, moved to shut down government-funded international broadcasters, and folded development programs into other agencies. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the State Department reorganization as necessary to shed “bloated bureaucracy” and the White House said the broadcasters had produced “radical propaganda” that taxpayers should not fund. A Democratic Congress cannot rebuild any of that against an unwilling executive. It can authorize the structure it wants, fund the positions it wants filled, and use confirmation hearings to extract commitments from the officials who will have to live within those constraints. That is slow work, and it will be invisible to voters. It also shapes what any future administration inherits.
The Western Hemisphere and the Foreign Financial Ties
Latin America will likely be an oversight priority rather than a legislative one. The United States removed Venezuela’s president through military force, the boat strikes continue, the administration has imposed sanctions on Cuba and threatened military action to change its government, and Democrats accuse the Cuban government of interfering in elections in Honduras, Argentina, Colombia, and Brazil. Some Democrats have called the Cuba sanctions cruel and potentially unlawful intervention; others call for an end to election interference. The caucus is not united on policy, but it is united on the proposition that Congress was not adequately consulted and that the legal basis for these actions requires greater scrutiny.
Expect hearings in both foreign affairs committees, witness and document demands on the disposition of Venezuela’s assets and the legal basis for the Venezuela operation, and a push to bring the hemisphere back under the ordinary rules that govern the use of force and covert action, including the notification requirements of the National Security Act.
The question of foreign financial ties runs through every geographic region, and it is the issue on which Senate Democrats sound most determined. A Senate staffer told Foreign Policy before the election that the foreign relationships of the president’s family and associates would be a central focus of the majority. The White House and the Trump Organization deny any conflict of interest, and the White House has said the president’s assets are held in a trust managed by his children.
The legal frame matters here, because the foreign-policy and ethics inquiries reinforce each other. The Foreign Emoluments Clause, the foreign agents registration regime, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the sanctions statutes all presume that foreign financial relationships with U.S. officials and their networks are subject to disclosure and review. A Congress with subpoena power can test that presumption against the record of the past two years. Committees are also likely to examine the use of family members and political supporters as diplomatic emissaries in place of career diplomats, and whether any of them have benefited financially. The question Democrats are likely to press is whether the president’s representatives abroad are serving their personal financial interests or those of the United States.
Meeks’ joint resolution of disapproval of a nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, filed under Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act, is an example of how a statutory review mechanism can be turned toward both nonproliferation and the question of who benefits from the deal.
Conclusion: The Institutional Stakes
The next two years will be read as a referendum on the president’s foreign policy, but the more consequential story will be institutional. The new majority’s power is procedural, but that does not mean it cannot also be substantive. It can withhold appropriations the president needs, attach conditions to must-pass bills, control confirmations, force floor votes through the statutory review mechanisms, and subpoena witnesses and documents. It cannot override a veto, and it faces an executive that reads its own authority expansively, a caucus divided on Israel and on how hard to press the Iran purse strategy, and a president who has alternated between offering to cooperate and vowing to veto everything.
What the new Congress can also do is enforce the law that already exists—Section 620I, the Leahy law, the Impoundment Control Act, the Arms Export Control Act—build the record on which courts and future Congresses will rely, and draft the reforms a future president will have to accept as the price of the next must-pass bill: a War Powers Resolution with teeth that survives Chadha, a trade-authority statute that requires affirmative congressional assent, an impoundment law without a pocket-rescission loophole. Democrats campaigned on lower prices and an end to the war in Iran. Without a veto-proof majority, their most durable tools are restoring Congress’s role over trade and the use of force.
