Fifty-two percent of total Iranian government spending went to the military by 2006, up from 16% in 1993, per Central Bank of Iran national accounts data provided to Fox News Digital by Miad Maleki, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former Treasury Department sanctions official. Education's share fell from 27% to 15% over the same period. That structural misallocation is the preexisting condition the U.S. sanctions campaign is now pressing against, and on Aug. 7, Treasury added cryptocurrency exchanges and international currency networks moving hundreds of millions of dollars for Iran to its target list.
Economic Fury: the pressure campaign's scope
Treasury's "Economic Fury" campaign said June 10 it had prevented "tens of billions of dollars" in revenue from reaching the Iranian regime and its proxies. OFAC sanctioned more than 100 vessels tied to Iran's shadow fleet since the start of 2026, per a July 29 announcement. President Donald Trump told Axios' Barak Ravid in a phone interview reported Aug. 9 that the strategy is "low-keying it," pointing to Iran's inability to pay its troops as evidence of financial collapse.
A Treasury spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the regime is "increasingly having to invent new ways to try to evade U.S. sanctions through shadow banking networks, including through exploiting crypto." Treasury said it continues to dismantle those networks.
The IRGC's evasion franchise and who profits
The evasion infrastructure generates its own winners. Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American conservationist who spent nearly six years in Evin Prison before his release alongside four other Americans in September 2023, told Fox News Digital the system works like a "franchise": because money cannot flow freely to the Iranian government's treasury, everything moves through black and gray markets, and the people controlling those channels have an incentive to preserve restrictions rather than end them.
The IRGC sits at the center of that architecture. Its economic arm, Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, designated by Treasury in October 2007, operates across construction, energy and infrastructure. The 2020 official budget allocated approximately $6.96 billion to the IRGC against $2.73 billion for the Artesh, Iran's conventional military. That is a 2.5x ratio, per the United States Institute of Peace's Iran Primer based on Iran's parliamentary research center figures. A 2017 American Enterprise Institute study estimated the IRGC's off-budget "gray budget" could add another 50% to 100% on top of official outlays.
The street-level result
The Iranian newspaper Jahan-e Sanat reported last week that supermarket workers described customers shoplifting bread, cheese and meat, or eating packaged food inside stores because they could no longer pay. That is the observable endpoint of decades of budget misallocation and an accelerating external pressure campaign operating simultaneously.
Treasury maintains standing authorizations under OFAC General License 8A covering humanitarian trade in agricultural products, medicine and medical devices, personal remittances, and communications-related goods and services. OFAC considers additional case-by-case requests.