In the last two months of the fiscal year that ends Wednesday, the Pentagon spent tens of billions of mandatory dollars from last year’s reconciliation law, intensely accelerating spending from its unusually large overall budget for the year, congressional sources said this week.
The Pentagon spends scores of billions of dollars each year, and the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year is always a time to ensure budgets get spent to the maximum. But this year’s last-minute spending spree was atypical in its speed and the amount of money at issue.
