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The Pentagon has failed its annual audit for the eighth consecutive year, continuing its streak as the only federal agency to never pass an audit even as Congress grants it a record high budget of over $1 trillion for 2026.
The Department of Defense identified issues with tracking funds for programs like its F-35 fighter jet program, the Pentagon’s most expensive project with a cost of over $2 trillion over the past few decades. The authors of the department’s annual financial report, released Friday, identified 26 material weaknesses within the department’s internal controls — referring to severe issues among the agency’s accounting that could lead to major misstatements in financial reports.
The report said that the department is committed to its goal of passing an audit — which is legally mandated for federal agencies — by 2028.
There are myriad reasons for the Pentagon’s inability to pass an audit. Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office found in a report that one reason is that the agency faces “significant fraud exposure” from military contractors, who engage in brazen and open price gouging.
The Pentagon has also historically been unable to account for its assets. This year, the Pentagon reported having $4.65 trillion in assets, but trillions of dollars’ worth of this may be in limbo; as of 2022, the Pentagon was unable to keep track of over 60 percent of its assets.
Despite this, Congress continues to give the Pentagon massive sums of funding. Last week, the Senate gave final passage to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) granting the Pentagon $901 billion in funding for fiscal year 2026. It passed with flying colors, 311 to 112 in the House and 77 to 20 in the Senate.
On top of the $156 billion in military spending granted by Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act earlier this year, the U.S.’s military budget now tops $1 trillion for the first time.
This funding stands in stark contrast with the historic affordability crisis gripping the U.S., triggered in part by the GOP’s sweeping cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits.
Polling has found that Americans increasingly can’t afford basic needs like health care and groceries; a recent survey by GQR for The Century Foundation found, for instance, that nearly 3 in 10 Americans reported delaying or skipping medical care in the past year for cost reasons, while over a third of Americans reported forgoing a meal to save money.
Reappropriating the Pentagon’s budget, meanwhile, could serve as a major boon to the working class. The National Priorities Project reported earlier this year, for instance, that the budget could have paid for 116 million public housing units, SNAP benefits for nearly 500 million people, or nearly 300 million children receiving Medicaid for a year.
The additional $8 billion over President Donald Trump’s requested military budget granted by Congress alone is more than enough to restore the SNAP funding slashed by Republicans in their budget bill, National Priorities Project has reported.
Instead, the funding will go toward fueling the Trump administration’s war mongering as he seeks to escalate his unpopular, illegal military aggression against Venezuela and Israel’s campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. With over half of the Pentagon’s budget going toward private contractors, the war budget will further enrich people like Elon Musk and Palantir CEO and billionaire Alex Karp as regular Americans are left by their government to die.
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