WASHINGTON — Lawmakers from both parties used Sunday’s political talk shows to relitigate the cost of the seven-week war with Iran and the fate of a sweeping artificial intelligence moratorium, sketching the contours of a midterm fight that has shifted decisively from battlefield to balance sheet.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Whitfield, R-Tenn., defended the administration’s prosecution of the conflict and the terms of the Apr. 12 Islamabad ceasefire, calling the deal “imperfect but durable” nearly four weeks after it took effect. Whitfield acknowledged the human toll — roughly 360 U.S. service members killed during the campaign, according to a Pentagon tally released Friday — but argued the strikes had “set Iran’s enrichment program back by years.”

“This was not a war anyone in this administration sought,” Whitfield said. “It was a war that became unavoidable. The question now is whether Congress steps up to fund the recovery, fund the families, and fund the deterrent posture that keeps the ceasefire holding.”

Democrats pushed back hard on the price tag. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Marisol Ortega, D-N.M., a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said preliminary Congressional Budget Office estimates put direct military spending on the Iran campaign at $84 billion, with another $19 billion in announced regional reconstruction commitments and an unspecified figure for veterans’ care that she expected to climb sharply over the next decade.

“We are being asked to write checks for a war whose strategic outcome is still being defined, and at the same time the administration is signaling it wants extensions of the 2017 tax cuts,” Ortega said. “Those two things cannot both be true.”

The Sunday programming reflected a clear shift in tone since the ceasefire. For most of March and early April, network panels were dominated by maps of strike corridors and debates over War Powers Resolution authority. By contrast, this week’s broadcasts focused on appropriations, veterans’ benefits, oil-market stabilization and the political wreckage of the bipartisan artificial intelligence moratorium that died Apr. 22 in the House Ways and Means Committee on a 24-21 vote.

That bill — co-sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. — would have imposed an 18-month pause on new hyperscale data-center construction and on training runs above a defined compute threshold. It cleared the Senate 52-48 on Apr. 7 with three Republicans crossing over, but stalled in the House amid heavy industry lobbying.

On ABC’s “This Week,” Rep. Daniel Choe, D-Calif., a Ways and Means member who voted for the bill, said he was working with two Republican colleagues on a narrower compromise that would tighten grid-interconnection rules and impose new water-use disclosures on large data centers but stop short of a moratorium.

“The energy math is real, and pretending it isn’t won’t survive the summer,” Choe said, referring to forecasts from regional grid operators warning of capacity shortfalls in Virginia, Texas and Arizona. “We have a window, maybe 60 days, to put something workable on the floor.”

Republicans were split on how aggressively to push back. Rep. Caleb Mansfield, R-Ohio, told “Fox News Sunday” that he opposed any federal cap on data-center growth but acknowledged “legitimate ratepayer concerns” in his district. Sen. Patricia Lambert, R-Utah, who voted for the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez measure in the Senate, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that she would support a compromise package “if it has real teeth on the energy side.”

The White House, which had publicly opposed the moratorium, signaled openness to grid-focused legislation. Press secretary Hannah Wexler, in a brief written statement Saturday evening, said President Donald Trump “supports responsible buildout of American AI infrastructure and is open to commonsense reforms that protect ratepayers.” She did not commit to specific provisions.

Midterm positioning ran beneath nearly every segment. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday morning showed the president’s approval rating at 43 percent, essentially unchanged from late March, with 51 percent approving of his handling of the ceasefire negotiations but only 38 percent approving of his handling of the economy. Generic congressional ballot tests favored Democrats by 4 points, within the survey’s margin of error.

“The war is no longer the dominant variable. Gas prices, grocery prices and the AI fight are,” said Theresa Klein, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies wartime electorates. “Incumbents in both parties are scrambling to define what the last seven weeks meant before voters define it for them.”

Several lawmakers used their appearances to preview specific legislative pushes. Sen. Whitfield said he would introduce a supplemental appropriations bill this week combining $14 billion in additional veterans’ care funding with $6 billion for Strait of Hormuz monitoring and a continued U.S. naval presence in the Arabian Sea. Sen. Ortega said Democrats would offer an amendment requiring quarterly reporting on reconstruction disbursements to Iraq and Yemen.

On the diplomatic front, Sen. Whitfield confirmed that a Senate Foreign Relations delegation would travel to Doha next week to meet with Qatari mediators and review the prisoner-exchange protocol that brought home the remains of U.S. service members on Apr. 18. He declined to say whether the delegation would meet Iranian officials.

Asked whether the ceasefire could survive a summer of domestic political friction in both Washington and Tehran, Whitfield was cautious. “It holds because both sides need it to hold,” he said. “That is not the same as saying it is permanent.”

Lawmakers said the Senate would take up the supplemental appropriations package as early as Wednesday, with floor action on a revised AI energy framework possible later in the month.