The US Department of Defence burned through £73.8 billion ($93.4 billion) in grants and contracts in September 2025 alone; the highest single-month military spend since at least 2008, and a figure that included millions in seafood, a concert-grade grand piano, and premium Herman Miller office chairs.
The findings come from a 9 March 2026 analysis by Open the Books, a nonpartisan government watchdog that has tracked Pentagon spending for nearly a decade. The report, first obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation, draws entirely on publicly available federal contracts data. The driver is a structural budget rule, known as 'use-it-or-lose-it,' that forces all federal agencies to exhaust their entire annual budget by 30 September or forfeit the remainder, potentially facing reduced allocations the following year.
