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House Passes NDAA to Push Military Spending Approved This Year Beyond $1 Trillion
Highlighting how the Pentagon is "replete with waste and fraud," one critic called it "a disgraceful and unconscionable misuse of taxpayer money."
Sep 10, 2025
Nearly all Republicans and 17 Democrats in the US House of Representatives voted Wednesday evening for a military bill that would push the figure for defense spending approved this year beyond $1 trillion.
The final vote for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2026 was 231-196, with just four Republicans opposing the bill, which will still need to be reconciled with the Senate's version.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, highlighted after the vote that the House's NDAA authorizes about $883 billion for defense spending—including over $848 billion for the Pentagon, which has never passed an audit—on top of the $150 billion in the GOP budget reconciliation package that President Donald Trump signed in July.
"Throwing a trillion dollars at the Pentagon—an agency replete with waste and fraud—at the same time the Republican Congress and the Trump regime are slashing spending on healthcare, education, housing, food assistance, and foreign aid is a disgraceful and unconscionable misuse of taxpayer money," Weissman said, referring to other provisions in the earlier package.
"On top of the age-old dangerous and wasteful spending, the bill pours billions into new boondoggles like Trump's 'Golden Dome' space interceptor vanity project and supercharges the dangerous development of killer robots for the battlefield," he noted. "Making it still worse is the administration's in-your-face, authoritarian misuse of Pentagon dollars—from the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of Washington, DC, to the illegal and murderous attack on a Venezuelan boat."
Weissman added that "the bill includes some modest, positive requirements to report waste, fraud, and price gouging to Congress and establishes financial penalties if the Pentagon fails its audit. But these small measures do not begin to offset the damage done by the dangerous and wasteful overall package."
House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who voted against the NDAA's final passage, told Politico that "we didn't get any of the amendments and the debates that we wanted; not a single solitary one."
"Meanwhile, all manner of different issues that are pure culture war partisan issues were allowed in," he continued. "I fear that many of those are going to pass."
In a statement after the vote, the Congressional Equality Caucus condemned "six Republican-sponsored anti-LGBTQI+ amendments," including bans on medically necessary healthcare for transgender service members and dependents.
"The National Defense Authorization Act has traditionally received strong bipartisan support, yet for the second Congress in a row House Republicans have tainted a bill aimed at improving the lives of servicemembers with poison-pill riders that threaten our troops' rights, their families' stability, and our efforts to retain top talent," said the caucus chair, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Cailf.).
"Republicans' sacrifice of a strong bipartisan vote for a politicized NDAA to appease the Trump administration and a small slice of their base cannot undo the sacrifice of the transgender service members, cadets, or military dependents that will be hurt by this bill," he added. "Congress should be fighting for those who fight for us—but it's clear the GOP has other priorities. I will keep fighting to prevent the harmful provisions in this bill from becoming law."
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Is the Pentagon Spending Taxpayer Money on Alien Tech?
Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Congress must hold the DOD accountability for how it uses its funds.
Aug 31, 2025
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:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
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…”
A Behemoth Without Oversight
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:
In FY 2024, total discretionary spending was about $1.6 trillion. Of that, the Pentagon alone received $842 billion. In other words, it got more funding than all other departments combined. You read that right: one (very special) department received more than all the rest put together.
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 Missing $21 Trillion: Fraud, Waste, or Something Worse?
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 $165 billion over budget, with $220 billion in spare parts poorly tracked. A 2023 CBS News investigation found that contractors routinely overcharged by 40-50%, with some markups reaching 4,451%. A 2016 report in The Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.
It is no longer even necessary to cover up fraud and corruption by wildly inflated prices. In 2017, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official Catherine Austin Fitts collaborated with Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University, to document the missing $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments at the DOD and HUD. In a June 2025 article published in Fitts’ journal The Solari Report titled “Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting?,” Dr. Skidmore discussed how the government responded to the publication of his research with Fitts. Its response was to immediately eliminate the paper trail leading to its covert financial operations. In particular: “Pentagon officials turned to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) for advice. Several months later, FASAB posted a new document (FASAB 56), which recommended that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds to conceal expenditures if it is deemed necessary to protect national security interests.”
Fitts remarked, “The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury, and announced to every private army, mercenary, and thug in the world that we are open for business.”
Speculation Run Rampant
In a widely-viewed interview by Tucker Carlson on April 28, 2025, Fitts expressed her belief that the missing trillions had been funneled into classified projects involving advanced technologies, including massive underground bunkers to protect elites from a “near-extinction event;” and that they were using advanced energy systems and hidden transit networks possibly linked to extraterrestrial tech. She discussed “interdimensional intelligence” and a secret space program linked to a “breakaway civilization.” The latter term was coined by UFO researcher Richard Dolan and is defined by Google as “a theoretical, hidden society that operates outside of mainstream civilization with advanced technology, often linked to UFO phenomena and secret space programs.”
In a Danny Jones interview in May 2025, Fitts alluded to Deep Underground Military Bases (“DUMBs”), perhaps used for “advanced technology or off-world operations.” Existence of these bases was confirmed two decades earlier by whistleblower Philip Schneider, a US government geologist and engineer involved in their construction. In his last presentation in 1995, Schneider said there were 131 of these cities connected underground by mag-lev rail, built at a cost of $17-26 billion each. According to his biographer, Schneider was assassinated in 1996 by a US intelligence agency for disclosing the government cover-up of UFOs and aliens.
Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Are we dealing with a scenario like that in such Hollywood movies as the 1997 film Men in Black, in which hidden forces—human or alien—control our fate?
As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government.
The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contends that no verifiable evidence supports extraterrestrial activity. But other prominent figures support the UFO-UAP narrative. In 2017, the New York Times exposed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), said to be a $22 million DOD initiative run by Luis Elizondo investigating UAPs from 2007-2012.
According to BBC News, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s space security program, claimed in a 2020 interview with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the US government has an “agreement” with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials. He alleged aliens have been in contact with the US and Israel, with secret underground bases where they collaborate on experiments. Eshed claimed the United States was on the verge of disclosing this under President Donald Trump but withheld it to avoid “mass hysteria.” The claims were unverified but provocative.
In recent years, Congress has increased its focus on UAPs, with high-profile hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, whistleblower David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified that the US possesses “non-human origin” craft and “dead pilots,” based on classified briefings. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee’s hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” featured testimony from Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and former NASA official Michael Gold, who claimed the US possesses UAP technologies and has harmed personnel in secret retrieval programs. Shellenberger alleged that a covert “Immaculate Constellation” program hides UAP data from Congress.
Some lawmakers, including Rep. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), continue to criticize Pentagon secrecy and to push for transparency. In May 2024, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, requiring the declassification of all UAP-related documents within 270 days. He stated:
This bill isn’t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it’s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people. I’m sick of hearing bureaucrats telling me these things don’t exist while we’ve spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studying them for decades.
Secrecy Undermines Democracy
With $21 trillion unaccounted for historically, $165 billion in F-35 overruns, and $125 billion in buried waste, the DOD’s financial mismanagement needs urgent reform. Congress is primarily responsible for overseeing the DOD budget, exercising its constitutional “power of the purse” under Article 1 of the US Constitution. So why isn’t it enforcing this mandate?
The chief excuse given is the need for secrecy for security reasons, but a congressional committee could be given access to the Pentagon’s financial data in closed session in order to exercise public oversight and enforce accountability. Other factors are obviously at play, including political influence, lobbying, campaign contributions from the defense sector, and a lack of penalties for noncompliance.
To restore accountability, Congress needs to enforce the Audit the Pentagon Act, modernize DOD systems, and investigate contractors profiting from lax oversight. UAP transparency is also critical, whether to debunk myths or uncover truths.
As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government. The Pentagon’s secrecy and lack of accountability could be shielding anything from contractor fraud to UAP programs and alien alliances. If there is information so secret that even our elected representatives don’t have access to it, who does have access? Is there a secret government above the government we know? Without fiscal transparency and accountability, we can no longer call ourselves a democracy, as JFK warned.
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NATO’s Contribution to the Climate Crisis Cannot Be Ignored
The alliance and its member states must be transparent about the scale of their emissions and must make serious commitments to reduce their carbon footprint.
Jul 26, 2025
According to new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute, or CCI, recent increases in Pentagon spending alone will produce an additional 26 megatons of planet-heating gases—on a par with the annual carbon equivalent emissions generated by 68 gas power plants or the entire country of Croatia.
With the Pentagon’s 2026 budget set to surge to $1 trillion (a 17% or $150 billion increase from 2023), its total greenhouse emissions will also increase to a staggering 178 megatons (Mt) of carbon equivalent emissions (CO2e). This will make the U.S. military and its industrial apparatus the 38th largest emitter in the world if it were its own nation. It will also result in an estimated $47 billion in economic damages globally, including impacts on agriculture, human health, and property from extreme weather, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s social cost of carbon calculator.
Yet the Pentagon’s true climate impact will almost certainly be much worse than estimated by the CCI, as the calculation does not include emissions generated from separate supplementary U.S. military funding, such as for arms transfers to Israel and Ukraine in recent years. It also does not include the emissions from armed conflict, which are considerable when it happens.
And the CCI study only covers U.S. military spending. Military spending in European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries is also surging. At the Hague Summit in June, the 32 NATO member states pledged to increase their military and security spending from 2% to 5% of GDP by 2035. As a result, NATO military spending in Europe and Canada could increase from around $500 million today to $1.1 trillion in 2035, when the combined defense budgets of the other 31 allies will essentially equal the Pentagon’s. Every dollar or euro of this military spending in preparation for NATO to fight hypothetical wars with China, Russia, or anyone else has a climate and opportunity cost.
This training and warfighting will have catastrophic climate consequences, including further water scarcity, sea-level rise, and desertification in vulnerable regions.
Meanwhile, U.S. military leaders want to spend more justified largely on threat inflation. During a recent meeting of military industrial leaders in Wiesbaden, Germany, for example, NATO’s recently appointed Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, restated the flawed case for increased military spending. He called on member states to prepare for the possibility that Russia and China could launch wars in Europe and the Pacific simultaneously, with 2027 being a potential, though highly speculative, flashpoint year.
Grynkewich, who is also head of the U.S. European Command, argued that the situation meant that allies have little time to prepare. “We’re going to need every bit of kit and equipment and munitions that we can in order to beat that,” he said.
His remarks were made during a U.S. Army Europe and Africa-hosted LandEuro symposium, designed to encourage military and industry leaders to find ways to significantly increase weapons production, especially in Europe. As always during such events, the two-day program served as an opportunity for companies to showcase various weapons systems at the symposium’s so-called “Warriors Corner.”
Grynkewich also repeated a key argument used by NATO leaders to justify increased military spending: the growing cooperation among adversaries.
“Each of these threats that are out there cannot be viewed, in my estimation, as discrete challenges. We’ve got to think about how all of them are aligning,” he said.
However, evidence of such an orientation among the so-called “Axis of Upheaval” (China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia) is patchy at best and primarily bilateral rather than as a fully-formed four-way alliance. This cooperation is also driven by shared frustrations with the U.S.-led international order and a desire to counter Western dominance. U.S. President Donald Trump’s systematic demolition of that “rules-based international order,” illegal military attacks on Iran, and constant anti-China rhetoric further shape this cooperation and risk it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At the same symposium, U.S. Army Europe and Africa Commander Gen. Christopher Donahue said that the U.S. Army and NATO have launched a new military initiative called the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Line,” which aims to enhance NATO’s ground-based military capabilities and promote military-industrial interoperability across the alliance. Donahue also warned that NATO forces could capture Russia's heavily fortified Kaliningrad region “in a timeframe that is unheard of” if necessary. Therein lies another disconnect. On the one hand NATO pleads a poverty of resources, and on the other brags about already having the capability to stop Russia’s “mass and momentum problem" and to attack and take Russian territory.
It should also be remembered that the United States currently operates over 870 overseas military bases and installations—two and a half times more than the rest of the world combined—and that NATO members already collectively account for 55% of global military spending.
The main disconnect at Wiesbaden, however, was the failure to consider the link between military spending and climate emissions. There was no “Green Corner” to remind NATO generals that the climate crisis is an existential threat, meaning it poses a danger to the fundamental existence of humanity and the planet. This blinkered approach comes right from the top.
In March this year, Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, wrote on X: “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” This training and warfighting will have catastrophic climate consequences, including further water scarcity, sea-level rise, and desertification in vulnerable regions. In turn, this will inevitably lead to political instability and further forced migration.
NATO’s contribution to the climate crisis cannot be ignored. The alliance and its member states must be transparent about the scale of their emissions and must make serious commitments to reduce their carbon footprint.
Instead of ramping up tensions with adversaries, the top NATO generals should be calling for political leaders to invest in diplomatic and nonmilitary solutions to today’s political crises. Then, as the authors of the CCI analysis argue, these increases in U.S. military spending could be redirected toward demilitarized climate resilience measures, such as public transit, renewable energy, or green new social housing—a true investment in human security.
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