Bottom Line Up Front: The Pentagon’s $93 billion September is not an aberration in an otherwise functional system. It is the system functioning exactly as designed, in an institution that has never once proven it can account for the money it already has.
When news broke in March 2026 that the Department of Defense had spent $93.4 billion in a single month including $6.9 million on lobster tails, $15.1 million on ribeye steaks, $225 million on furniture, and a $98,329 Steinway grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, the response followed a predictable arc. Outrage. Mockery. Political point-scoring. Then the next news cycle.
What got lost in the noise is the more important story: none of this was accidental, none of it was new, and none of it can be fixed by firing anyone.
To understand why, you have to start not with lobster, but with a law passed in 1990.
Step One: The Legal Requirement Nobody Followed for 28 Years
In 1990, Congress passed the Chief Financial Officers Act, which established modern financial reporting rules for the federal government and required all major federal agencies to submit to annual independent financial audits. It was unremarkable legislation. It codified standard corporate accounting practice. Banks do it. Public companies do it. Hospitals do it.
Of the 24 major federal agencies covered by the law, 23 now pass their annual audits.
The Department of Defense first attempted to comply in 2018. Twenty-eight years after the law was enacted.
It failed that audit. It has failed every one since.
Step Two: What “Failing an Audit” Actually Means
This is where precision matters, because the phrase “failing an audit” tends to generate two opposite and equally wrong reactions: either dismissal (“it’s just paperwork”) or hyperbole (“trillions are missing”).
Neither is accurate. The truth is more consequential than either.
When the Pentagon fails its audit, it does not receive a letter saying money was stolen. It receives what auditors call a “disclaimer of opinion.” In plain English, that means: we cannot tell you whether these financial statements are accurate or not. Not fraudulent. Not verified. Simply unknowable.
For context: if your personal accountant issued a disclaimer of opinion on your tax return, the IRS would not shrug and move on. For a household, it would mean: I cannot prepare your taxes because I cannot determine what you own, what you owe, or what you spent.
The Pentagon has received that answer eight consecutive times.
The most recent audit (for fiscal year 2025) covered $4.7 trillion in assets and $4.7 trillion in liabilities. Auditors identified 26 material weaknesses. The most serious category of internal control failure across the department. The Pentagon could not adequately account for approximately 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets.
To put that in human terms: the agency responsible for protecting the United States cannot reliably tell you what it owns, where it is, or how much it cost.
Step Three: The Contractor Problem Nobody Talks About
One of the most revealing details from the audit record involves the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, projected to cost more than $2 trillion over its lifespan. The most expensive weapons program in human history.
The Pentagon technically owns the global pool of spare parts for all F-35 variants. But Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney (the primary contractors) manage those parts. When auditors asked the Pentagon to document what it owned, the Pentagon asked Lockheed.
Lockheed’s response: producing those records would require approximately 450,000 labor hours, making the report too expensive. The Pentagon appears to have accepted this estimate.
Congress authorized procurement funding for 90 F-35s in one recent year. Eleven more than the Pentagon even requested. The department’s own Inspector General has noted that its inability to track contractor-held property could lead it to “understate its property held by contractors and potentially buy more than it needs.”
In other words: we may be paying to manufacture spare parts we already own, held by a contractor that has told us it’s too expensive to check.
Step Three-B: What Happens When Nobody Is Watching
The F-35 is not an isolated case. It is the logical endpoint of a system that funds programs without requiring accountability and then finds it politically impossible to stop them even when they visibly fail.
The Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship program is the textbook example. Conceived in the early 2000s as a fast, flexible warship that would use modular technology to conduct multiple mission types, it quickly became what defense analysts call a “zombie program”. One where, as a former Marine Corps captain and Pentagon reform analyst put it, “everybody knows deep down we are going in the wrong direction. But because so much money is involved and so much political capital is invested, you can’t stop the train until the problems are so overwhelming that no one can feign ignorance.”
Sailors nicknamed it “Dry Dock One” because it so rarely left port. One ship broke down during pretrial tests before it even reached its 2012 trial mission. Propulsion flaws were found across an entire class of vessels. The Navy eventually concluded it needed 32 ships, far fewer than the 50+ originally planned, and asked to stop building them.
Congress forced the Pentagon to buy three more anyway.
The projected lifetime cost: $100 billion or more for fewer than 30 ships of limited operational value.
Honorable mention: The Zumwalt-class destroyer. A $22 billion program originally planned for 32 ships, ultimately built to three. Its primary gun system was eventually rendered inoperable because the ammunition designed for it cost $800,000 per round. Too expensive to actually fire. The Navy now describes the ships as technology demonstrators. They have no defined combat mission. Congress funded all three.
The pattern across both programs – and dozens like them – is consistent: programs survive not because they work, but because cancellation requires publicly admitting that the money is gone. Contractors are in congressional districts. Jobs are in congressional districts. Votes are in congressional districts. The financial accountability failure and the political accountability failure are, in the end, the same failure.
Step Four: Congress Has Kept Funding It Anyway
Here is where the institutional failure becomes impossible to dismiss as bureaucratic complexity.
Since the Department of Defense first attempted (and failed) its audit in 2018, Congress has authorized trillions of dollars in additional military spending with no audit-passing requirement attached. No conditions. No penalties. No financial accountability as a prerequisite for receiving the next appropriation.
For fiscal year 2025 alone, Congress granted $1.312 trillion to the department.
Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act each year that would require the Pentagon to return a portion of its budget to the Treasury as a financial penalty for failing its audit. The amendment has never received a roll call vote. Members of Congress have repeatedly declined to even put the question to a vote.
No other major federal agency operates this way. As Colorado Newsline noted: “No other federal agency could get away with this. There would be congressional hearings. There would be demands to remove agency leaders, or to defund those agencies. Every other major federal agency has passed an audit.”
Step Five: Now Add the “Use-It-Or-Lose-It” Rule
This is the part that produced September 2025’s headlines and it requires a brief history lesson to understand properly.
The federal government operates on a fiscal year that ends September 30. Under long-standing federal appropriations law, most discretionary funding that has not been spent by that date expires and is cancelled. This is not merely custom it is the product of 150 years of legal architecture, rooted in legislation first passed in 1870 to prevent a different kind of abuse: post-Civil War executive departments that would spend money Congress hadn’t authorized, then present Congress with the bill.
The system worked, in its original context. But it created a new incentive structure: if an agency returns unspent funds, it signals to Congress that its budget was too generous and next year’s appropriation may be reduced accordingly. The rational bureaucratic response is to spend everything, on anything, before the clock runs out.
The last day of the fiscal year has been described by one government contracting expert as “Amazon Prime Day” for the federal government.
Since 2008, the DOD has spent an average of $62.4 billion in September; roughly twice what it spends in any other month. The September surge has been documented across every administration, Republican and Democratic alike. It is not a political problem. It is a structural one.
In September 2025, the total reached $93.4 billion. The largest single-month expenditure by any federal agency since at least 2008, and roughly 50% above the historical September average. In the last five business days of September alone, $50.1 billion was spent on grants and contracts. More than the entire annual defense budgets of Canada and Mexico combined.
A fair objection — and why it doesn’t change the story. When the September 2025 spending became public, Pentagon defenders were quick to note that the food purchases have a legitimate explanation: “surf and turf” is a documented military tradition, a morale-boosting meal served to troops before deployments, dangerous missions, and extended overseas assignments. The September food bill also covers holiday meals. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s for service members who won’t be home. That explanation is real, it is defensible, and this piece accepts it. But it explains the steak and lobster. It does not explain the Steinway grand piano, the $225 million in furniture, the $3.5 billion in cable TV contracts, or the record $6.6 billion in foreign government purchases. And critically: it doesn’t explain why 2025 was a record. Under Secretary Austin in September 2024, the Pentagon spent $103.7 million on meat, fish and poultry – including $16.6 million on ribeye steak and $6.1 million on lobster tail. Austin’s food bill exceeded Hegseth’s on several line items. The troops were fed under both. The structural problem predates both secretaries by decades.
One additional factor drove 2025’s record total that deserves acknowledgment: the DOD operated under a continuing resolution. A congressional funding stopgap that holds budgets at prior-year levels for much of the fiscal year. That constraint likely compressed spending into the back half of the year, leaving a larger-than-usual unspent balance when September arrived. In other words, congressional dysfunction in the appropriations process itself amplified the end-of-year surge. The use-it-or-lose-it mechanism and the chronic failure to pass budgets on time are not separate problems. They compound each other.
The lobster and the lobster stands and the Steinway piano were not the disease. They were symptoms.
Step Six: The Complete Picture
Now the individual threads can be read together.
The Department of Defense is the only major federal agency that has never passed a financial audit in the eight years it has been attempting them. Its own Treasury account (a reported $1 trillion balance) could not be adequately supported by its own financial managers in the most recent review. It operates under budget rules that structurally incentivize end-of-year waste. It has received uninterrupted congressional appropriations throughout without accountability conditions and those appropriations have increased over the same period.
The administration that presided over September 2025’s record spend had explicitly promised to incorporate the Department of Government Efficiency into Pentagon operations. Secretary Hegseth stated in February 2025 that “we need to know when we spend dollars, we need to know where they’re going.” The Open Books CEO John Hart, whose nonpartisan watchdog organization produced the September analysis, called the spending “unacceptable” and noted that the department has “consistently said its mission is to refocus on warfighting and lethality.”
Weeks after the September spending spree, millions of Americans lost SNAP food assistance benefits amid the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Republican legislation added stricter work requirements to the food assistance program, cutting eligibility for low-income families. The $93.4 billion spent in one month by DOD could have funded ACA health insurance tax credits for three full years, according to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office.
Meanwhile, the first 100 hours of the U.S. war with Iran was estimated to cost approximately $900 million per day. A military engagement that bypassed the traditional appropriations and authorization process entirely.
The question is not whether the lobster spend was wasteful. It clearly was.
The question is whether waste of that scale is even visible inside an institution whose books have never once been verified. And which has been continuously rewarded with more funding regardless.
What Would Actually Change This
Three reforms appear repeatedly in nonpartisan budget analysis, each requiring something Congress has historically been unwilling to surrender.
Budget carryover authority. National Bureau of Economic Research modeling found that allowing agencies to roll over even a fraction of unspent funds into the following fiscal year would virtually eliminate the September panic-spending problem. Congress could provide agencies 87 cents on the dollar with equivalent value to the current system. The obstacle: every dollar an agency carries over is a dollar Congress cannot re-appropriate, cannot attach conditions to, and cannot use as a political lever. It requires Congress to reduce its own annual power over agencies.
Audit accountability as a condition of appropriation. Sen. Sanders’ amendment (never put to a vote) represents the simplest version of this: you fail the audit, you return a portion of next year’s budget. For any other publicly funded institution in America, this would be unremarkable. For the Pentagon, it has been systematically blocked.
Multi-year or no-year appropriations for capital programs. For large, complex capital programs (weapons systems, infrastructure, logistics) multi-year budget authority already exists in limited form and could be expanded. This reduces the September crunch for the specific categories most prone to panic-buying.
None of these reforms require constitutional amendments. None require new agencies. All three require only that Congress pass a law and accept the reduction in leverage that comes with it.
The 2028 target the Pentagon has publicly set for passing a clean audit reflects an acknowledgment that these problems cannot be fixed quickly. Whether that target is realistic will depend on measurable progress in future audits, not long-term plans. And on whether Congress decides that accountability is a prerequisite for the next trillion dollars, or merely a goal for sometime after it.
The Bottom Line
The $93 billion September is not the story. It is the evidence.
The story is an institution that has never proven it can account for what it already has, operating under rules that punish fiscal efficiency and reward panic-spending, funded without conditions by a Congress that has declined eight consecutive times to even vote on whether accountability should be required and now engaged in an active war whose daily cost exceeds what the Pentagon spent on steak and seafood in its most extravagant month on record.
The lobster is a distraction. The audit is the story.
Footnote: This piece does not dwell on the frequently cited claim that “$2.3 trillion went missing from the Pentagon before 9/11.” The kernel is real: on September 10, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld publicly acknowledged that the Pentagon could not account for $2.3 trillion in transactions – a figure drawn from an Inspector General report on accounting adjustments, not cash missing from a vault. The following day’s attacks shifted every news cycle that might have pursued it, and the underlying accounting infrastructure has never meaningfully improved. As eight consecutive audit failures since 2018 confirm. The $2.3 trillion figure has since migrated into conspiracy-adjacent framing that obscures rather than illuminates the genuine, well-documented institutional failure this piece describes. The truth, as documented above, is damning enough without it.
Sources: Open the Books | Military.com — Eighth Audit Failure | Federal News Network | Responsible Statecraft — Asset Tracking | ProPublica — Littoral Combat Ship | Scientific American — Zumwalt & Pentagon Waste | Congressional Research Service — Unobligated Funds | Antideficiency Act — Wikipedia | NBER — Use-It-Or-Lose-It Research | New Republic — September Splurge | Truthout — Sanders Amendment | Colorado Newsline | Taxpayers for Common Sense — History
Methodology: This analysis relies on primary government documents, nonpartisan watchdog reporting, and peer-reviewed research. Data on September spending sourced from Open the Books analysis of USASpending.gov. Audit failure data sourced from Department of Defense Office of Inspector General and Federal News Network. Human-AI collaboration featuring Angela Fisher from The Open Record and Claude.AI disclosed per The Open Record editorial standards.
