Andrew Leyden/ZUMA
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Somewhere, paid for with your tax dollars, are $12,540 worth of three-tiered fruit basket stands. It’s a symptom of a much larger problem.
Buried in the way Congress funds the government is a “use it or lose it” rule that forces federal agencies to spend whatever’s left in their budgets before the fiscal year ends September 30 or hand the excess money back to the Treasury and potentially lose it in the next year’s allocation.
This happens every year, and every administration does this. But last September shattered every previous record, according to a report released in March by Open the Books, a nonpartisan government watchdog that tracks federal spending.
The Defense Department spent $93.4 billion in September, with $50 billion of that spent in the last five working days. To put that in perspective, only nine countries on Earth have an annual military budget that large.
The shopping list included luxury items like $6.9 million for lobster tail, $15.1 million in ribeye steak, and $2 million for Alaskan king crab, as well as musical instruments ($21,750 for a custom handmade Japanese flute), ice cream machines ($124,000), sushi prep tables ($26,000), and $12,540 for three-tiered fruit basket stands. This is the same administration that created DOGE—an entire department whose sole purpose was to eliminate government waste.
The month after the September splurge, the government shutdown left 42 million Americans—1 in 8—briefly cut off from SNAP food assistance. A federal judge eventually ordered benefits restored, but the disruption was immediate and real for millions of families.
And it may get worse. In July, President Donald Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act restructured SNAP with new work and eligibility requirements and shifted part of the cost to states. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates as many as 4 million people could lose their food assistance permanently as a result.
Trump is now pushing to increase next year’s Defense Department budget by 66 percent, to $1.5 trillion, the largest increase since the Korean War.
