The Investigative Journal’s weekly accounting of where federal dollars went, who collected them, and which spending lines warrant a closer look.
Federal spending in the week leading into April 28, 2026 was defined by two competing currents. On one side, the Pentagon accelerated a multibillion-dollar buying spree across submarines, missile interceptors, and commercial software platforms — pushing April into one of the busiest contracting months in recent memory. On the other, the Government Accountability Office reported that improper federal payments climbed to an estimated $186 billion in fiscal year 2025, a $24 billion year-over-year increase that GAO itself characterized as likely an undercount. The gap between what the federal government is buying and what it cannot account for continues to widen.
What follows is a survey of the most consequential spending developments of the week, drawn from primary records on USAspending.gov, daily contract notices published by the Department of War, GAO oversight products, and FEMA disbursement announcements. Dollar figures have been verified against the originating source documents wherever possible, and pending matters have been flagged as such.
1. GAO: $186 Billion in Improper Payments, and Probably More
On April 27, 2026, the Government Accountability Office released its annual payment integrity assessment, finding that 15 federal agencies reported approximately $186 billion in improper payments across 64 programs in fiscal year 2025 — an increase of $24 billion over fiscal year 2024. According to the report, roughly 82 percent of the figure ($153.1 billion) consists of overpayments, with another $14.3 billion classified as “unknown,” $10 billion as underpayments, and $8.4 billion as technically improper.
The bulk of the errors are concentrated in a handful of large benefit programs. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Medicaid program saw improper payments rise by $6.3 billion to $37.4 billion in FY 2025, which CMS attributes primarily to insufficient documentation as states resumed eligibility redeterminations and provider revalidation following the wind-down of COVID-era flexibilities. Medicare Fee-for-Service, by contrast, reduced its improper payment estimate by $2.9 billion to $28.8 billion, which HHS credits to strengthened internal controls. The Earned Income Tax Credit and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program round out the top five programs by error volume.
GAO has flagged that the headline number likely understates the problem. As of April 2026, nine of the ten matters for congressional consideration GAO recommended in March 2022 to enhance transparency and accountability of federal spending remain open. The watchdog has separately documented that hundreds of billions in federal spending have not been disclosed on the official transparency portal. Records suggest that without standardized fraud risk assessments across agencies and consistent reporting of program-level error rates, the true exposure is not measurable from public data alone.
2. Navy Locks In $15.4 Billion for the Columbia-Class Submarine Program
General Dynamics Electric Boat received a $15.38 billion contract modification for additional Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine design work, lead-yard support, sustainment, integrated enterprise planning, and supplier-base expansion, according to Department of War contract notices published earlier in April. The award is one component of approximately $16.65 billion in submarine-related obligations the Navy posted during the month.
The Columbia program is the Navy’s top acquisition priority and the planned successor to the aging Ohio-class fleet that carries the sea-based leg of the U.S. nuclear triad. Filings indicate the program will ultimately cost more than $130 billion across 12 boats, with first patrol still tracking to the early 2030s. The size of this modification — committed up front to stabilize a strained submarine industrial base — reflects a deliberate policy choice by the Navy to absorb cost risk in exchange for schedule certainty on a program that has historically faced supplier shortages.
Compared to historical norms, this single modification exceeds the entire annual shipbuilding accounts of most U.S. allies. Whether the industrial-base investments deliver on schedule is the central question for oversight: the Congressional Budget Office and GAO have both warned in prior cycles that submarine production rates remain below program needs, and the additional dollars will not on their own resolve workforce or vendor-quality bottlenecks. This is a spending line worth tracking against future delivery milestones.
3. Lockheed Martin and RTX Take a Combined $8.46 Billion in Patriot-Related Awards
The Department of War announced on April 10, 2026 that Lockheed Martin received a $4.761 billion firm-fixed-price contract for production of PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptors, with completion expected in June 2030. In the same window, RTX secured a separate $3.7 billion award for Patriot Guided Enhanced Missile — Tactical (GEM-T) interceptors. Together, the two contracts commit roughly $8.46 billion to a single air defense family in a single month.
The buying surge reflects a structural change in U.S. air defense demand. Patriot interceptors have been heavily expended in support of Ukraine’s air defense and committed to allied stocks across the Middle East, leaving U.S. inventories depleted at the same time that the Pentagon is signaling its intention to triple PAC-3 production lines. Lockheed Martin and the Department of War announced a framework agreement in early 2026 to roughly triple PAC-3 MSE output, and these April contracts represent the production tranche that follows from that framework.
Independent oversight of these awards will turn on two questions: whether the contractors can actually achieve the higher production rates that have been announced, and whether the unit prices reflect the volume commitments. Records suggest the Pentagon is paying premium rates to lock in capacity rather than waiting for competitive pressure to lower per-unit costs. That is a defensible posture given current demand, but it warrants a pricing review by GAO once the first deliveries close.
4. Salesforce $5.6 Billion Army IDIQ Begins Drawing Down
The U.S. Army’s $5.6 billion, ten-year Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract with Salesforce — first announced in late January 2026 and executed through Salesforce subsidiary Computable Insights LLC — continued to draw down task orders during April. Filings indicate the deal is the largest enterprise software contract ever awarded to a commercial SaaS company by the Department of Defense, covering integrated talent management, logistics coordination, and readiness tracking across Army installations worldwide.
The contract’s significance is less about its ceiling than about its architecture. By consolidating dozens of legacy software procurements into a single enterprise vehicle, the Army is betting that platform integration will save more than the contract costs in foregone licensing, redundant data systems, and stranded customizations. The deal also positions Salesforce as a primary integration layer for any future agentic AI deployments inside the Army’s data environment — a path the company has publicly described.
The accountability question is whether Army contracting officers will exercise the IDIQ ceiling responsibly. IDIQ vehicles are easy to abuse: agencies can ride the contract beyond its original scope through task orders that face less scrutiny than standalone awards. Investigators should watch for scope drift, especially toward AI services that were not contemplated in the original solicitation.
5. Anduril’s $20 Billion Lattice Vehicle: A Ceiling, Not an Obligation
The Army’s $20 billion enterprise contract with Anduril Industries for the Lattice AI open-architecture platform, awarded in mid-March 2026, recorded its first task order during April for counter-unmanned aerial systems work. The vehicle consolidates more than 120 separate procurement pathways into a single ten-year framework spanning software, hardware, data infrastructure, and support.
It is essential to read the headline number correctly. According to Anduril President Matthew Steckman, the $20 billion ceiling is “not money attached” to the deal — it is an ordering vehicle through which any federal buyer can purchase Anduril’s commercial products. In other words, the figure represents the maximum that could be obligated if the vehicle were fully exercised over a decade, not a guaranteed payout. Independent analysts have drawn parallels to comparable enterprise vehicles awarded in the past where actual obligations came in well below the ceiling.
The first counter-drone task order is the first real data point. As additional task orders accumulate, USAspending.gov filings will show how aggressively the Army is exercising the vehicle and which mission areas are absorbing the most spending. This is a contract structure designed for speed; the trade-off is reduced visibility into individual task-order pricing, which puts the burden on after-the-fact oversight.
6. FEMA Disburses $657 Million in Backlogged COVID-Era Public Assistance
FEMA announced on April 23, 2026 that the Department of Homeland Security had approved more than $657 million in Public Assistance funding to reimburse states, local governments, and health-care facilities for costs incurred responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The funds flow to 75 separate Public Assistance projects across multiple states and territories.
The award timing is itself the story. FEMA’s Public Assistance program is statutorily required to reimburse eligible costs, but processing delays have lengthened materially: states have publicly reported that disaster funding has slowed under the current administration, with some projects awaiting reimbursement years after the underlying expenses were incurred. NPR reported earlier in April that FEMA is behind on billions in disaster payments to states, with delays measured against the agency’s own historical processing baselines.
Compared to historical norms, the current backlog is unusual. The April 23 disbursement clears a portion of the COVID-era queue, but it does not address the larger question of whether FEMA’s processing capacity has degraded and, if so, why. Records suggest that staff reductions, contracting delays, and reorganization at DHS have all contributed; pending matters are not yet resolved, and oversight will need to test each cause individually.
7. $36.5 Billion Disaster Supplemental Moves Through Congress
A disaster supplemental appropriations package totaling $36.5 billion in emergency funding for hurricane and wildfire response advanced through the House by a 353-69 margin earlier this spring, with $18.7 billion of that total directed to FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund. The package mirrors the administration’s request to Congress and addresses a depleted DRF that has struggled to keep pace with concurrent disasters.
The supplemental’s structure includes additional emergency line items distributed across appropriations subcommittees: $2 billion for Commerce-Justice-Science, $2.5 billion for State-Foreign Operations, $8 billion for Transportation-HUD, and $2.65 billion for Interior-Environment specifically for wildfire suppression. The Senate’s broader FY 2026 budget resolution, passed April 23, calls for $1.2 trillion in additional defense spending over the coming decade, with defense budget authority growing roughly 27 percent between 2026 and 2027 — context that frames the disaster supplemental as one piece of a broader expansionary fiscal posture.
Disaster supplementals are a recurring feature of recent federal budgets, but the running total deserves scrutiny. Each supplemental is presented as one-time emergency spending; in aggregate, they have become a routine appropriations channel that escapes the budget caps and procedural review applied to regular appropriations. GAO has previously recommended that Congress build a more predictable disaster funding mechanism into base appropriations to reduce the need for repeated supplementals. That recommendation remains open.
8. Treasury: March Outlays Hit Post-COVID High Despite DOGE Savings Claims
Treasury’s Monthly Treasury Statement reported $548 billion in federal outlays for March 2026 — an increase of $20.7 billion, or 3.9 percent, over March 2025. The federal deficit for the month was $164.1 billion, up from $160.5 billion a year earlier. For the first six months of fiscal year 2026, federal spending has run $83.9 billion ahead of the prior year, totaling roughly $3.6 trillion. Data shows this is the highest level of fiscal-year-to-date outlays on record, exceeding even peak COVID-era spending in equivalent months.
The numbers complicate the public narrative around the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has reported approximately $160 billion in claimed savings since its inception, but independent analyses have estimated that DOGE-driven actions — including litigation costs, severance, contract terminations, and reduced revenue collection at agencies like the IRS — may have produced offsetting costs of roughly $135 billion this fiscal year. The net fiscal effect, if those estimates hold, is a fraction of the headline savings figure.
For accountability journalism, the takeaway is that aggregate spending and claimed savings should be tracked against the same baseline. A reduction in agency headcount that produces an offsetting drop in user-fee or enforcement-driven revenue is not the same as a reduction in net outlays. Investigators should match each major DOGE savings claim to a corresponding entry in the Treasury statement and the affected agency’s financial report.
Patterns Worth Watching
Three patterns from this week’s filings warrant deeper investigation in the coming months. First, the Pentagon’s accelerating use of large enterprise IDIQ vehicles — Salesforce, Anduril, and others — moves the locus of contracting decisions from individual awards (which receive scrutiny) to task orders (which often do not). Second, the persistent gap between announced DOGE savings and Treasury’s outlay data deserves a transaction-level reconciliation. Third, FEMA’s processing backlog raises questions about whether the agency has the operational capacity to administer the disaster funds Congress is appropriating to it.
These are not headline scandals. They are the kind of slow, structural problems that compound over time and that public records can illuminate if the records are read closely. The Investigative Journal will continue to track each thread.
Sources
- USAspending.gov — Federal Award Data
- GAO-26-108694: Payment Integrity — Agencies’ Estimated Improper Payments Increased to $186 Billion in Fiscal Year 2025
- GAO Press Release on FY2025 Improper Payments
- CMS — Fiscal Year 2025 Improper Payments Fact Sheet
- U.S. Department of War — Daily Contract Announcements
- DoW Contracts for April 24, 2026
- DoW Contracts for April 8, 2026
- FEMA — $657M Public Assistance Reimbursement Announcement (April 23, 2026)
- FEMA — Disaster Relief Fund Monthly Reports
- Senate Appropriations — Disaster Supplemental Summary
- CRFB — Senate FY 2026 Budget Resolution Analysis
- House Appropriations — FY26 Appropriations Completion
- Salesforce — $5.6B Army Contract Announcement