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Joshua Scheer
The $93 Billion Pentagon Shopping Spree
Washington is once again demonstrating one of its oldest and most reliable traditions: screaming about government waste while spending taxpayer money like a drunken hedge fund manager with someone else’s credit card. Much like others in the Trump orbit—Kash Patel and Kristi Noem—Defense (or war) Secretary Pete Hegseth apparently needed his turn at the trough.
In the grand scheme of things, this spending barely registers next to the tens of billions now being poured into a disastrous and deadly war with Iran. But that’s precisely the point. Whether it’s billions for bombs or millions for luxury furniture and seafood, the pattern remains the same. The rhetoric in Washington is always about draining the swamp; the reality is that the swamp keeps getting bigger.
At the end of the day, this latest Pentagon spending binge is just another reminder of the system we’re living in—one where the people in power campaign against waste while presiding over it.
After months of watching officials across the administration talk about fiscal discipline, we now have the latest exhibit in the gallery of government excess. Reporting from The New Republic reveals that the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, went on a $93 billion spending spree in September 2025 alone, the final month of the federal fiscal year.
Not the year. The month.
And before anyone assumes this was an emergency mobilization to defend the country, much of the money went to things that would look more at home on the expense account of a luxury resort than in the budget of the world’s largest military.
We’re talking about lobster. Crab. Ribeye steaks. Ice cream machines. Designer chairs. And yes—fruit basket stands that cost thousands of dollars.
If this sounds like parody, it isn’t.
According to an analysis by the government watchdog Open the Books, the Defense Department rushed to spend enormous sums before the fiscal year closed. The reason is the classic Washington incentive structure known as “use it or lose it.” If agencies don’t spend all the money Congress gives them by September 30, they risk getting less the following year.
So when the clock runs out, the spending begins.
And in 2025, it began with gusto.
Among the purchases reported were a $98,329 grand piano from Steinway & Sons for the Air Force chief of staff’s residence and $5.3 million in new devices from Apple, including iPads.
Then came the food.
The Pentagon reportedly spent $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $6.9 million on lobster tail, and $15.1 million on ribeye steak—all in a single month. Add to that $124,000 for ice cream machines and more than $139,000 on hundreds of doughnut orders. I wonder if Trump ate any and deviated from his obsession for fast food?
But the true crown jewel of bureaucratic absurdity might be the furniture.
The Defense Department spent $225 million on furniture in 2025, more than it has in over a decade. That included $12,000 fruit basket stands and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of luxury recliners from Herman Miller.
Fruit baskets with stands.
The phrase alone captures the strange decadence of the moment. One can imagine the war room: satellites humming, screens glowing, generals studying maps of the world—and somewhere in the corner, a very expensive stand holding oranges.
The most staggering figure, however, came in the final days of the fiscal year. In just the last five days of September, the Pentagon pushed $50.1 billion out the door in grants and contracts.
That is more than the entire annual military budgets of most countries on Earth.
All of this unfolds against the backdrop of a $1.8 trillion federal deficit in 2025 and endless speeches from politicians about the urgent need to cut government spending. For years, President Donald Trump and his allies have campaigned on the promise that they would finally bring fiscal sanity to Washington.
Yet the reality looks remarkably familiar.
The same administration and party that lectures Americans about tightening their belts is presiding over a Pentagon budget that spends millions on luxury seafood and designer furniture.
And the contrast becomes even harder to ignore when placed next to domestic policy. Around the same time this spending spree occurred, millions of Americans faced the loss of food assistance through the SNAP program during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Not only that, but because of this current war we are now at risk of losing even more food benefits. “The day before President Donald Trump announced the joint US-Israeli assault on Iran—that gutting broad-based categorical eligibility would likely strip modest federal food aid from around 6 million people, including nearly 2 million children.” The irony is sickening: while much of the country struggles to afford basic groceries, the United States Department of Defense wades through luxury goods as if the treasury were an endless buffet. Millions of Americans worry about putting food on the table, while the Pentagon spends millions on lobster, crab, and designer furniture.
In other words, Washington was debating whether struggling families could afford groceries while the Pentagon was ordering lobster tail.
To be fair, some of this dysfunction is baked into the system. The “use it or lose it” budget rule encourages agencies to burn through remaining funds rather than risk future cuts. It’s a perverse incentive that has distorted federal spending for decades.
But the scale of the Pentagon’s spending spree suggests something more than routine bureaucracy. It reveals a government culture where enormous sums of money move with almost no public scrutiny until a watchdog group or journalist pulls back the curtain.
And when the curtain lifts, the view can be surreal.
A $100,000 piano.
Millions in crab legs.
Luxury chairs.
Fruit basket stands.
The Pentagon insists its focus is “warfighting and lethality,” but the receipts tell a story that feels closer to a catered conference than a national security operation.
The deeper problem isn’t the crab or the piano or even the furniture.
It’s the system itself.
Every election cycle, politicians promise to drain the swamp, eliminate waste, and finally run government like a responsible enterprise. But once in power, the machinery of Washington keeps operating exactly as it always has—expanding budgets, moving money, and quietly ensuring that the spending never stops.
The Pentagon’s $93 billion shopping spree isn’t an anomaly.
It’s a glimpse into how the empire actually runs.
And apparently, it runs on lobster.
Heres Stephen Colbert to try to make us laugh
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