Open the Books – “Defense officials typically enter the end of each fiscal year with at least one goal in mind: spend the rest of the military’s budget by any means necessary. Otherwise, “use-it-or-lose-it” funding rules force the Pentagon to forfeit its unused money and potentially see reduced funding next year. Open the Books has tracked the annual September spending bonanza for nearly a decade. Military spending has spiked every year, regardless of which party controlled the White House. However, there has never been anything quite like September 2025, when $93.4 billion was spent on grants and contracts. Since at least 2008 — and presumably in history — no federal agency has ever spent so much on grants and contracts in a single month. In the last five working days of September alone, the DoD spent $50.1 billion on grants and contracts. That’s more than the annual defense budget of countries like Israel and Italy. In fact, there are only nine foreign countries that spend that much on their military in an entire year! These amounts only include money sent to entities outside the government, not salaries for service members and scores of other expenses. Instead, the shopping spree encompasses luxury food items like lobster, high-end furniture and rushed IT purchases.

Open the Books has covered use-it-or-lose-it spending for years. In 2025 we called on Secretary Hegseth to rein it in because, of the dozens of areas of fiscal concern at the Pentagon, this may be the easiest problem to correct: “Mr. Secretary, you have the power to end this practice today. We urge you to do so as you pursue your goal of reorientating DOD around its central warfighting and lethality mission.” This year, as more kinetic action has kicked off in Iran and across the Gulf states, it’s time for the Pentagon to focus on replenishing critical items like defensive missile and drone interceptors, not fancy appetizers…”