$886 billion. Your tax dollars.
Broken down in terms that actually make sense. Every number sourced from public DoD budget documents, GAO audits, and IG reports.
All data from public sources. Accurate enough for Congressional staffers, engaging enough for E-4s to screenshot.
Interactive drill-down: every DoD dollar by agency, state, contractor, and industry. Powered by USAspending.gov.
View →Top 50 defense contractors ranked by obligations. Revolving door connections tracked.
View →Full-text search across every DoD contract. Body armor, cloud services, fuel — find what they're buying.
View →How committee seats buy base budgets. Armed Services Committee power mapped to installation investment.
View →15,000-soldier Army shortfall. $170K–$400K per recruit. $130M rebrand. Why spending more money hasn't fixed a structural problem.
View →What DoD pays for the same work done two different ways. The clearance tax, in numbers.
View →~1,700 senior officials moved to defense industry in 5 years. The loopholes they use. The cost.
View →The $640 toilet seat is back. OTA contracts, proprietary supply chains, and why the Pentagon still overpays.
View →Six consecutive failed audits. $1.1T in Army assets unlocatable. Why it matters to units.
View →The Balfour Beatty scandal: falsified records, $65M settlement, and your Tenant Bill of Rights.
View →$400B acquisition. $1.7T lifecycle. 65% mission capable. The most expensive weapon system ever.
View →$628B in cost growth across DoD programs. KC-46, LCS, FCS — what went wrong and why.
View →NDAA vs. appropriations, Continuing Resolution mechanics, and what a CR actually costs units.
View →$50B annually, 9.5M beneficiaries, DHA reorganization failure, and mental health access gaps.
View →Where the $895B actually goes. Top-line breakdowns by service and appropriation.
View →Base-level O&M and MILCON for 25 major installations. Fort Liberty to NS Norfolk.
View →What the DoD spends per service member — and where that money goes.
View →GAO and IG findings. The stuff that makes you want to flip a table.
View →$400B/yr. The shadow workforce that rivals uniformed military. KBR, Blackwater, Booz Allen — what they cost and what oversight exists.
View →70%+ of the $90B intelligence budget flows to private contractors. Booz Allen, Leidos, SAIC — the clearance economy and what your TS/SCI is worth post-service.
View →$30B+ burned on cancelled software. DIMHRS, ECSS, IPPS-A, LMP — the programs that failed, why they failed, and why DoD keeps failing audits because of it.
View →Top defense contracts. Who gets the money, and what for.
View →What it costs to produce each job code — training pipeline, equipment burden, and 4-year DoD investment.
View →$1.7T over 30 years. B-21 Raider, Columbia-class SSBNs, Sentinel ICBM — all three legs of the triad, simultaneously. One Nunn-McCurdy breach already.
View →$60B/year, 9.6M TRICARE beneficiaries, and a consolidation that closed clinics, degraded access, and handed $130B in contracts to Humana and Centene. Why you wait 6 weeks for an MTF appointment.
View →$50B supply chain the military runs on. Every meal at the DFAC, every gallon of jet fuel, every spare part — and why your unit parts order takes 90 days.
View →$300B/year and 7+ years to field a weapon system. JCIDS, PPBE, Milestone A-B-C, and why China fields capabilities in 5 years while DoD takes 20.
View →$27B/year that inflated rents near bases. How the BAH feedback loop works, why privatized housing failed, and what the E-4 in San Diego is actually paying.
View →Side-by-side comparisons that put spending in human terms.
View →The U.S. left behind approximately $7.2 billion in military equipment when withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021, including aircraft, vehicles, weapons, and communications gear — part of a broader $28 billion program to train and equip Afghan security forces.
The $28B program produced an army that collapsed in 11 days. The weapons left behind included 76,000 vehicles, 600,000 weapons, 208 aircraft, and night-vision equipment. The Taliban now has one of the largest military arsenals in South Asia, provided by American taxpayers. The IG reports warning this would happen go back to 2009.
The Pentagon's 2022 audit — its fifth consecutive failed audit — found that auditors could not account for $3.8 trillion in assets and identified over 2,700 findings requiring remediation.
The Department of Defense is the only major federal agency that has never passed an audit. It has failed every audit since the legal requirement to be auditable was enacted in 1990. The audit process itself costs $280 million per year. No executive has been removed for audit failure. No contract has been cancelled. The $280 million buys a report that says the same thing every year.
The Army allocates approximately $125 million per year to suicide prevention programs while spending over $500 million annually on military recruiting — a 4:1 spending ratio favoring acquisition over retention of life.
The Army loses more soldiers to suicide each year than it loses to enemy action in most recent conflicts. The institution spends four times more money convincing 18-year-olds to join than it spends keeping current soldiers alive. When the recruiting budget gets cut, there are press releases. When suicide prevention funding gets cut, there are footnotes.
POGO's "Brass Parachute" report found that 380 high-ranking Pentagon officials, generals, and admirals took jobs at top defense contractors between 2008 and 2018 — an average of 38 per year.
These are the same officials who wrote requirements, awarded contracts, and approved cost overruns — who then went to work for the companies that benefited from those decisions. The mandatory cooling-off period is 1-2 years, which contractors routinely work around with consulting arrangements. The revolving door spins so fast it has become the default expectation, not the scandal.
All spending data sourced from publicly available documents including the DoD Comptroller budget reports, Government Accountability Office (GAO) audits, Inspector General (IG) reports, USAspending.gov, and Congressional Budget Office analyses. Honest MOS does not editorialize raw numbers — we contextualize them.