The US federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming nearly half of the discretionary budget.

As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued “Greenbacks,” as Abraham Lincoln’s government did. But I have written on that before (see here and here), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense (DOD).

Under the Constitution, the military budget should not be paid at all, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Expenditures of public funds without a public accounting violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which provides:

The Pentagon failed its seventh financial audit in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets—approximately $2.58 trillion—untracked. From 1998 to 2015, it failed to account for $21 trillion in spending.

As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. US President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

President John F. Kennedy echoed that concern, warning in 1961 that “secret societies” and excessive secrecy are “repugnant in a free and open society,” threatening democracy by withholding truth from the public. He warned that excessive concealment, even for national security, undermines democracy by denying citizens the facts needed to hold power accountable. “No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed,” he said. If untracked billions fund classified programs, citizens are left powerless, governed by a shadow entity answerable to no one.

Those concerns persist today. On August 13, 2025, Joe Rogan interviewed US Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who leads a House Oversight Committee focused on government transparency regarding various topics, including UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs). Luna said the committee had been formed after she and two other congresspeople were denied access at Eglin Air Force Base to information on UAPs provided by whistleblowers. The problem, she said, was that Congress was supposed to represent the public and be an investigative body for it, “and you have unelected people operating basically in secrecy… I think this goes all the way back even to JFK, with how they basically have operated outside of the purview of Congress and basically… have gone rogue…”

The Department of Defense’s $885.7 billion budget for 2025, approved by the House of Representatives, dwarfs the military spending of China ($296 billion), Russia ($84 billion), and the next eight nations combined. Managing $4.1 trillion in assets—from aircraft carriers to secret drones—along with $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g. personnel costs and pensions), the federal government’s largest agency oversees a military empire spanning over 4,790 sites worldwide. Yet it operates with minimal oversight.

The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 mandated audits for all federal agencies, but the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 delayed the Pentagon’s first department-wide audit to 2018 due to its unwieldy size, its decentralized systems, and its outdated software. The DOD has failed every audit since that time. In 2024, it could not account for its $824 billion FY 2024 budget, with 2,500 new audit issues identified. Of 24 reporting entities, only nine received clean opinions, while 15 received disclaimers due to insufficient data. In fact the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged DOD financial management as high-risk for waste, fraud, and abuse ever since 1995.

A 2016 report in The Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.

As observed in a January 2019 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, openly secret budgets were first legalized in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted that newly created agency from public financial disclosure. The act stated, “The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations related to the expenditure of Government funds.”

The aim of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was to curb billions of dollars said to be lost each year through fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of public budgets. Despite the mandated audits for all federal agencies, the DOD—the only major agency without a clean audit—has received $3.9 trillion in congressionally approved funding since 2018. “Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached,” observed federal budgeting expert Lindsay Kosgharian, “they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.”

The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023, backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), proposes docking 0.5–1% of budgets for audit failures, but the measure has not received a vote.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched with promises to strip waste, fraud, and abuse from federal agencies, has conspicuously sidestepped the Pentagon. A June 2025 article titled “Why DOGE Was Always Doomed: The Pentagon Problem,” points out that the DOGE mission was seriously hampered by the Pentagon’s exemption from auditing:

Funds that are not accounted for divert resources from critical needs like troop readiness, healthcare, and infrastructure. Overbilling by contractors enriches corporations while taxpayers foot the bill. And the lack of transparency erodes public confidence, as Americans struggle with domestic priorities.

The Pentagon’s audit failures mask not just inefficiency and waste but pervasive fraud and corruption. Between 1998 and 2015, Inspector General reports show that the DOD could not account for $21 trillion in spending—65% of federal spending during that period. For perspective, the entire US GDP in 2015 was $18.2 trillion. In 2023, the agency failed to document 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets, up from 61% the prior year. A 2015 DOD report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste was suppressed to protect budget increases.

There is plenty of verified waste to support the case for mismanagement. Military contractors, who receive over half of the Pentagon’s budget, are a major culprit. The F-35 program, managed by Lockheed Martin, was reported in 2021 to be

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