re: Pentagon spending - on crabs, salmon and 1,800 dollar chairs

Seems like that is standard practice if your wives find out that there is a bit of temporary surplus in the family budget.

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whopping $15.1 million on ribeye steak.

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As a former soldier and a current chef, this brings to mind the scene from Apocalypse Now:

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They lined us up in front of a hundred yards of prime rib. All of us, you know, lined up and looking at it. Magnificent meat! Really! Beautifully marbled... magnifique! Next thing, they're throwing the meat into these big cauldrons. All of it, boiling it. I looked inside, man, and it was turning gray. I couldn't frickin' believe that one!

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It’s a damn shame what’s about to happen to that ribeye. Anyone who’s ever been handed a charred lump of gristle off an MKT on “steak night” already knows how that story ends.

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This is not new or their fault, yet the author of this article is trying to paint this administration and specifically Hegseth in a bad light.

It's poor budget rules. Blame the people who made them years ago.

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The rules themselves aren’t their fault. Pretending the SecDef has no mechanisms to change or work around those rules is a little disingenuous, but fine, set that aside. The real question is what the money was spent on.

You can go right now and read years of posts in the Ukraine thread from the same crowd now fluffing Hegseth, complaining nonstop about our shortage of artillery shells. Funny how that urgency disappears when the spending is lobster tails and baby grand pianos. Maybe some of that money could’ve gone to artillery shells instead, just as one example.

He’ll go look up Iraqi freedom spending. If it was under 2500 and you could semi articulate a reason, it was rubber stamped. I had several pairs of sunglasses, different knives and other BS with no accountability. I wore glasses and couldn’t even wear the sunglasses.

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They couldn't spend it on much needed ammo and munitions?

Or improvements in housing or the VA?

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Color of money rules.

Combined with the aforementioned "use it or lose it" mentality probably accounts for half of all government waste.

Drop in the bucket, amirite?

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The data showed that the Defense Department spent more than $225 million on furniture, the highest level since 2014, including one chair that cost $1,844. Since 2008, the DOD has spent an average of $257.6 million on furniture every September.

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Looking at the average for furniture it’s obvious this happens every September with this being higher than past 11 years. This spending amount for furniture was below the average since 2008. We had multiple deployments and spending on furniture must have been huge for 2008 thru 2013 for this past September to still be below the average since 2008.

This is from the main article avoiding the daily beast’s take in OP link.

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Furniture spending today is far lower than in President Obama’s administration, when the military routinely spent $300 to $400 million every September. However, it has increased compared to Joe Biden’s administration. Since 2008, there have only been four Septembers when the DoD spent less than $178 million on furniture: the four Septembers that Biden was president.

To be fair, federal office buildings were closed during part of Biden’s administration due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The whole federal government still somehow managed to drop $3.3 billion on furniture from 2020 to 2022, including solar-powered picnic tables and Ethan Allen leather recliners.

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Below is the contract and grant spending since 2008 with the September spikes. Biden’s Autopen had large increases in September 2023 and 2024 spending.

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/pentagon-should-focus-on-defense


The problem is the use it or lose it policy and the budget process for the big Septembers.

Reward saving while being realistic about the decrease possibly being just a one year decrease and go back to normal the next year. With a grant or contract you might find it would just double the next year due to timing issues, but the policy forces people to process all at end of the year or you won’t get both years.

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Use-it-or-lose-it spending on IT has been studied for years. Research in the American Economic Review found that from 2004 to 2009, the federal government spent 23% of its IT budget just in the last week of September.

The frenzy of spending had drastic consequences. Those same IT purchases were 5.7 times more likely to receive a “low quality” score from government chief information officers, based on their cost and usefulness to the government.

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The king crab is the one that seems most likely to be a Trump defense issue. Dems kept it up for a little while before reducing some, and then it jumped back up in 2025.

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The problem is the use it or lose it policy and the budget process for the big Septembers.

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Honest question.

Who makes the policy?

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Honest question.

Who makes the policy?

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Congress sets time-limited appropriations> DoD distributes that money> internal incentives push units to spend what they were given before the clock runs out.

But the Secretary of Defense still has broad discretion over how that money is actually used. The deadlines exist because Congress wrote the appropriations law, but the SecDef ultimately decides whether funds get used for a particular purchase or program. If leadership doesn’t want to spend money on something, nothing in the “use it or lose it” structure forces them to buy lobster tails and baby grand pianos. They can choose not to obligate the funds.

You'd think the doge administration would choose not to spend it. They don't have to.