The House is poised to expand the use of a secretive mechanism for funneling weapons to Israel.
Hidden deep in a must-pass State Department funding bill is a provision that would allow for unlimited transfers of U.S. weapons to a special Israel-based stockpile in the next fiscal year, strengthening a pathway for giving American weapons to Israel with reduced public scrutiny. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is set to discuss the bill Wednesday morning.
The stockpile — known as War Reserve Stock for Allies-Israel, or WRSA-I — is “the least transparent mechanism of providing arms to Israel,” former State Department official Josh Paul told Responsible Statecraft. Since Oct. 7, Israel has quietly purchased huge numbers of American weapons from WRSA-I, facilitating a wave of airstrikes that many analysts consider the most intense bombing campaign of the 21st century.
The transfer process is simple. When Israel asks for weapons from WRSA-I, the secretary of defense can approve the request without having to go through typical steps like notifying Congress or even the White House in advance. Then “Israel can just drive in, pull whatever it requires, and drive out,” said Paul, who now runs a lobbying firm called A New Policy, adding that payments for the weapons are “worked out or provided in the future.”
The legislation, crafted by committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-Fla.), would build on a 2024 law that temporarily waived restrictions on the value and type of U.S. weapons transferred to WRSA-I each year. (U.S. law previously limited such transfers to $200 million annually.) That law also gave the secretary of defense the authority to assess the value of arms transfers rather than relying on the fair market value of the article.
Even before these changes, the U.S. had already started taking advantage of WRSA-I to quietly fuel Israel’s war in Gaza. In the early days of the conflict, Biden administration officials appeared to dodge transparency rules by cutting up larger transfers from WRSA-I into smaller weapons packages that fell under the $25 million threshold for notifying Congress of the sale. This helps to explain how Israel has managed to prosecute the war in Gaza despite receiving few publicly acknowledged weapons sales from the U.S.
Some worry that these arms transfers could place additional pressure on U.S. weapons stockpiles, which have already been strained by American support for Israel and Ukraine.
According to Paul, the proposed expansion of WRSA-I risks creating “a significant drain on U.S. military readiness.”
The effort to expand arms transfers to Israel comes after a panel of United Nations experts determined that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli government rejected that claim, which it says relies “entirely on Hamas falsehoods.”
Notably, the bill also contains a provision that would eliminate all of the State Department’s reporting requirements, meaning that the department would no longer need to submit reports to Congress on issues like human rights abroad.
“Congressional oversight would take a very big hit if this were to pass as it exists now,” said John Ramming-Chappell, an adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “Congress and the public would have less information about U.S. foreign policy and its impact.”
