By Jose Navarro, MBA | The Navarro Report | National Affairs
Call it what you want — the Pentagon spent forty-seven years as the Department of Defense before President Trump ordered it rebranded the Department of War last September, a name change the Congressional Budget Office estimates could cost taxpayers $10 million to $125 million on its own, and “hundreds of millions” more if Congress makes it permanent. Whatever the letterhead says, the department’s behavior last fall told the real story: a record $93.4 billion in grants and contracts in a single month, timed precisely to beat a fiscal-year deadline, much of it on furniture, luxury food, and rushed purchases that had nothing to do with warfighting.
According to the watchdog group Open the Books, the Department spent more in September 2025 than any federal agency has spent in a single month since at least 2008. More than half of it — $50.1 billion — went out in the final five business days alone, more than the entire annual defense budgets of Israel and Italy combined. The receipts read like a country club invoice: $6.9 million on lobster tail, $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $15.1 million on ribeye steak, $139,224 on donuts, and more than $225 million on furniture — the most spent on office furnishings since 2014. This is the same department whose secretary told troops, on the final day of that spending spree, that it was “completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”
This is not new behavior. “Use it or lose it” spending spikes every September, when unspent agency funds are typically forfeited back to the Treasury and future budgets risk being cut to match actual usage. But the scale set a new record, and it landed at a moment the department can least afford to look careless with money.
Munitions the Country No Longer Has
While the Department of War was buying crab legs, it was also running short on the weapons it actually needs. A joint inspector general report from the Department of War, State Department, and USAID — released this month — found that Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. military campaign against Iran that began February 28, has produced “strategic inventory shortfalls” in key munitions. The Pentagon’s own comptroller estimated the operation’s cost at $33.4 billion as of June 29, including $22.3 billion in munitions expended and cumulative attrition. Independent trackers using Pentagon, CSIS, and Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates now put the total closer to $43.5 billion as of this week — a figure still climbing, and still not reflected in either the fiscal 2026 defense budget or the president’s 2027 budget request. Congress has not passed a supplemental to cover it.
Fourteen service members were killed and 417 wounded in the combat phase alone; hundreds of buildings and dozens of aircraft were damaged or destroyed. CSIS puts the full campaign cost between $34 billion and $42 billion once deployment, higher operational tempo, equipment losses, and elevated fuel prices are factored in — costs incurred, the analysis notes, on top of a defense budget that already assumed peacetime operations. At the campaign’s peak, during the first six days alone, the operation burned through roughly $1.9 billion a day — a daily rate that dwarfs the historical averages for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.
So the ledger reads: a war depleting the country’s own weapons stockpiles enough that the inspector general now flags it as a strategic vulnerability, an unfunded bill approaching $40-plus billion with no appropriation to cover it, and — in the same fiscal year — a $93.4 billion September spending binge on items that won’t refill a single missile silo.
The Deficit Context
None of this happens in isolation. The federal deficit for fiscal year 2026 had already reached $1.966 trillion as of September 1, according to the Senate Joint Economic Committee, with the Congressional Budget Office projecting total federal outlays of $7.449 trillion for the year — $439 billion more than fiscal 2025. Every dollar spent on premium Herman Miller chairs or Alaskan king crab in the Pentagon’s year-end scramble is a dollar borrowed against a deficit already approaching $2 trillion, at a moment the department’s own watchdogs say the actual weapons inventory needs replenishing.
San Diego, home to Naval Base San Diego, Naval Base Point Loma, and one of the largest concentrations of Navy and Marine Corps assets in the country, has a direct stake in whether that inventory gets rebuilt with real appropriations or patched together with the same use-it-or-lose-it habits that bought $225 million in furniture last year.
A Pattern, Not an Accident
The fiscal year closes again this month. If the pattern holds — and Open the Books notes it has held across administrations of both parties for nearly two decades — the department now legally branding itself for war will again face the choice between returning unspent funds to the Treasury or spending them on whatever clears procurement fastest. Given the inspector general’s own warning about “strategic inventory shortfalls,” the honest test of the new name is not what it costs to paint on the building. It’s whether the money that used to buy crab legs in September instead buys the missiles the department says it’s short on.
Taxpayers will find out soon enough. The Pentagon’s fiscal 2026 year-end numbers surface within weeks, and Congress still hasn’t appropriated a dime specifically to cover Epic Fury or replenish the munitions the inspector general flagged as short. A department that spent $50 billion in five business days last September, while quietly running low on weapons for the next crisis, owes the public more than a new name on the building.
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