Let's Cut Some Spending: The Pentagon's Year-End Panic Spend

In our Let's Cut Some Spending series, ForAmerica chronicles the many ways Washington wastes YOUR tax dollars.

Today's offering: the Pentagon's record-shattering, $93.4 billion year-end spending spree.

Government watchdog Open the Books has tracked the Pentagon's annual "use-it-or-lose-it" habit for nearly a decade: every September, federal agencies rush to burn through whatever budget they haven't spent, terrified that leftover money will convince Congress to shrink next year's request. But September 2025 broke the mold entirely -- the Department of Defense spent $93.4 billion on grants and contracts, the most any federal agency has spent in a single month since at least 2008. More than half of that, $50.1 billion, went out the door in just the last five business days of the month, more than the entire annual defense budgets of Israel and Italy combined.

And what did your tax dollars buy? Try $6.9 million on lobster tail, $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $15.1 million on ribeye steak, and $124,000 on ice cream machines, according to Open the Books' itemized findings.

"Binge-buying bureaucrats at the Pentagon burned through tens of billions of dollars on impulse purchases."

That's Sen. Joni Ernst, who's pushing her RECEIPTS Act to force a clean audit of Pentagon spending. Open the Books CEO John Hart has also written directly to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, urging him to break the cycle before this September rolls around again -- especially with the Pentagon requesting the largest budget in military history this year.

---

$93.4 billion could have funded a lot of body armor, barracks repairs, or paychecks for the troops instead of a year-end lobster-and-ice-cream binge. Let's cut some spending.

Source: Open the Books