President Donald Trump may want a Defense Department rebrand — but rather than changing its name to “Department of War,” he should force the Pentagon to stop being a department of waste.
Our investigators at Open the Books last month identified 20 areas of fiscal concern within the Pentagon, many of them tolerated for decades, that damage its warfighting abilities.
The Defense Department has long been a “department of everything,” running its own schools, grocery stores, golf courses and more — splitting its focus and allowing for rampant overspending.
The department has never passed an audit, uses overclassification to wrongly conceal programs from oversight, and squanders billions every year through lax contracting practices and questionable congressional earmarks.
Even the most fiscally prudent administration would struggle to reform all that systemic Pentagon waste at once.
But one reform Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should tackle without delay is the Pentagon’s gratuitously wasteful “use it or lose it” spending binge that happens at the end of every fiscal year.
This month, federal bureaucrats across Washington are rushing to spend all the money Congress appropriated for their departments this fiscal year before the clock runs out on Sept. 30.
The goal is to exhaust all those funds as justification for requesting even more in the coming year.
Outside of safety-net programs, Defense spends more than any other department — and has requested another record-breaking $961.6 billion for fiscal year 2026.
That means it’s the first place where the “use it or lose it” habit must be broken.
Since 2008, both Republican and Democratic administrations have thrown defense money out the window each September at more than double the normal monthly rate.
Under President George W. Bush, the Pentagon spent a record $85.4 billion on contracts and grants in September 2008.
During Trump’s first term, the two costliest months for defense spending came in September 2018 ($63.3 billion) and September 2019 ($59.4 billion).
And in September 2024, near the end of President Joe Biden’s tenure, the spree reached $79 billion — more than the annual defense budget of all but seven countries on Earth.
In just the last five days of that fiscal year, the Pentagon burned through $33.1 billion, more than Israel’s total annual defense budget for 2023.
What did taxpayers buy last September?
Among other things: $6.1 million in lobster tail; $30.1 million in books, newspapers and periodicals; and $211.7 million in new furniture — expenditures that were more about luxury than lethality.
Furniture spending in particular saw a dramatic rise over the average monthly outlay of $52.7 million.
Hegseth has the power to make this September different.
He can order commanders and procurement officers to spend responsibly, refuse to rubber-stamp dubious contracts, and reward discipline rather than indulgence.
Ending the binge would send a clear signal: The era of use-it-or-lose-it is over.
In an ideal world, Congress would have already eliminated this Pentagon scam by giving the administration more leeway to carry over or redirect unspent funds to critical defense priorities.
Still, this administration has not been reluctant to assert its budget authority.
If Trump can hit pause on foreign food aid or the delivery of life-saving HIV drugs, he can certainly pause orders for lobster tail.
In February, Hegseth said the Pentagon would find $50 billion in savings within the department.
He started doing so in March, when he cancelled over $580 million worth of contracts and program spending related to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and decarbonization initiatives.
In May, he added $5.1 billion in additional contract cuts for “ancillary things like consulting and other nonessential services,” along with more DEI-related trims.
Open the Books has long tracked spending in the Pentagon’s K-12 school system, the Department of Defense Education Activity, whose $2.3 billion budget educates about 67,000 military dependents near military bases worldwide.
That amounts to $34,328 spent per pupil every year — more than any state in the union, including New York.
Some of that largesse goes to social-engineering projects rather than core subjects: Video of a 2022 DoDEA teacher conference showed its employees bragging about hiding student gender transitions from military parents.
Hegseth is right to target “woke” spending, but he needs to wage a wider war on waste in his department.
Ending use-it-or-lose-it this month would send a powerful signal. American taxpayers, and our potential adversaries, are watching.
John Hart is the CEO of Open the Books, a government spending watchdog.