The Pentagon spent an historic $93 billion on grants and contracts just in September in 2025, according to a new report obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
According to the report, produced by government watchdog Open The Books (OTB), the Department of War (DoW) has not seen a level of spending at the end of a fiscal year so high since at least 2008. The Department spent over $50 billion on grants and contracts in the last five business days of September alone—spending that Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst chalks up to “binge-buying bureaucrats.”
Every September, Pentagon officials look for ways to spend the remainder of the military’s budget in order to avoid forfeiting unused money and facing reduced funding in the future under federal “use-it-or-lose-it” rules. OTB, which has tracked the Pentagon’s annual spending for nearly a decade, sent a letter asking War Secretary Pete Hegseth to reorient the department “around its central warfighting and lethality mission.” Despite this, the group says “there has never been anything” like September 2025.