Each Tuesday, The Investigative Journal reviews the federal government’s public spending records — daily contract announcements, oversight reports, and budget filings — to track where taxpayer dollars are flowing and where the numbers warrant a closer look. This week’s review of records from the Department of War, the Government Accountability Office, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency surfaces a familiar theme: the distance between what the government commits to on paper and what it ultimately spends remains wide, and the cost of its largest programs keeps climbing.
The dominant number this week is the F-35. A new GAO report and a pair of fresh contract modifications, both dated within the past month, describe a weapons program whose lifetime cost now exceeds $2 trillion even as the military plans to fly the aircraft less. Below, seven spending items drawn from the week’s records, each traced to its original source.
1. A $2 trillion program gets a $13.7 billion course correction
On June 11, GAO published “F-35 Sustainment: Actions Needed to Ensure Updated Strategy Improves Persistent Readiness Challenges” (GAO-26-108113), its latest assessment of what it calls the most costly weapon system in the Department of War’s inventory. The report found that a sustainment strategy the department launched in 2025 — the “GSS Reset” — will require an estimated $13.7 billion more than previously planned through fiscal 2031. GAO also projected that the military services will face an annual gap of more than $1 billion between what it costs to sustain their F-35 fleets and their stated affordability goals by the mid-2030s.
Those figures sit atop a long-running cost trajectory. GAO’s prior work (GAO-24-106703) estimated that operating and sustaining the planned fleet of 2,470 aircraft across a 77-year life cycle would push the program’s total acquisition and sustainment cost beyond $2 trillion, with sustainment alone rising from roughly $1.1 trillion in 2018 to $1.58 trillion in 2023 — a 44 percent increase, driven in part by extending the fleet’s service life to 2088. The records indicate that even as those costs climbed, the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps projected flying the jet less on an annual basis than originally planned.
The program’s appetite was visible in the same week’s contract ledger. On June 26, the Department of War announced that Lockheed Martin’s Aeronautics unit in Fort Worth received a $74.2 million modification to definitize United Kingdom and Italy weapons-integration work for F-35 “Block Four” capabilities, an action that obligated more than $187.3 million in non-U.S. partner funds at award. A separate $23.3 million Lockheed modification the same day covered material modification kits for F-35 retrofits across the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. GAO made three recommendations aimed at risk mitigation and contract incentives; the readiness and cost problems it flagged have persisted across multiple administrations.
2. A $500 million ceiling, a $250,000 down payment
The single largest award in the June 26 announcements was also a study in how federal contract figures can mislead a casual reader. Vertex Aerospace LLC of Madison, Mississippi, received what the Department of War described as a “ceiling $500,000,000” firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for logistics support of the Air Force’s C-12 aircraft fleet — work spanning bases from Alaska to more than 20 foreign capitals and running through June 2031.
Yet the records show that only about $250,000 was actually obligated at the time of award: $237,125 in operations and maintenance funds, $7,250 in research funds, and $5,659 in Foreign Military Sales funds. The half-billion-dollar figure is a ceiling — the maximum the government could spend if it exercises the full scope over five years — not a committed outlay. The distinction matters for anyone tracking federal spending: indefinite-delivery “ceiling” values routinely dwarf the dollars ultimately obligated, and aggregating headline contract numbers without separating ceilings from obligations overstates actual spending. Records indicate the award was competitively procured, with three offers received.
3. $186 billion the government concedes it should not have paid
The week also returned attention to GAO’s most recent payment-integrity findings. In its fiscal 2025 estimate (GAO-26-108694), GAO reported that 15 federal agencies identified roughly $186 billion in improper payments across 64 programs — an increase of about $24 billion over fiscal 2024. Approximately $153 billion, or 82 percent, took the form of overpayments.
GAO has tracked this category for more than two decades, and its data indicate the government has reported roughly $3 trillion in improper payments since fiscal 2003. The agency has consistently found the errors concentrated in a handful of large benefit programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit among them — and notes that its published estimates do not capture the full scope of the problem, because some programs do not report estimates at all. The persistence of the figure across administrations of both parties suggests a structural weakness in how the government verifies eligibility and recovers payments, rather than a problem unique to any single agency or year.
4. GAO says $251 billion is still on the table
On May 12, GAO released its 16th annual report on duplication, overlap, and fragmentation (GAO-26-108505), part of a trio of accountability reports the agency said could yield between $132 billion and $251 billion in future savings if Congress and agencies act on open recommendations. GAO credited prior action in these areas with about $774 billion in financial benefits since 2011 and added 97 new recommendations this year.
Several individual items carry billion-dollar price tags. GAO suggested Congress could save an estimated $156.9 billion over 10 years by equalizing Medicare payment rates for the same office visits across different care settings; reauthorizing the First Responder Network Authority before it expires in 2027 could preserve $15 billion in revenue over 15 years; and offsetting Disability Insurance benefits against Unemployment Insurance received in the same period could save $2.2 billion over a decade. “Even more is within reach if additional recommendations are implemented,” Acting Comptroller General Orice W. Brown said in announcing the reports.
5. A $30 million bet on a strategic mineral
Tucked into the Defense Logistics Agency’s June 26 awards was a maximum $29.98 million delivery order to United States Antimony Corp. of Thompson Falls, Montana, for antimony metal ingots — a sole-source action serving the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. Antimony is used in ammunition, flame retardants, and military-grade batteries, and the United States has had no significant domestic mine production in recent years, leaving it heavily dependent on imports.
The award is small by Pentagon standards but notable as a data point in the broader federal push to shore up critical-mineral supply chains. Records show DLA structured the purchase as a delivery order against an existing five-year contract, citing a sole-source justification under federal acquisition rules — a procurement pattern worth watching as agencies move to onshore materials that have become entangled in trade and export-control disputes.
6. Allied dollars moving through the Pentagon’s books
Several of the week’s contracts illustrate how Foreign Military Sales inflate the headline value of U.S. defense awards while being funded by allied governments rather than U.S. taxpayers. L3 Technologies of Northampton, Massachusetts, received a $44.2 million modification for MK 20 electro-optical sensor systems in which the U.S. Navy’s share was 51 percent and the governments of Australia (17 percent), Japan (16 percent), and Canada (16 percent) covered the balance under the FMS program.
The same dynamic appeared in the Lockheed Martin F-35 modification noted above, where more than $187 million in non-U.S. partner funds was obligated. For readers parsing daily contract totals, the takeaway is that a meaningful share of announced “defense spending” is reimbursed by foreign buyers — a distinction that public records make available line by line but that aggregate spending tallies often blur.
7. An emergency account running close to the line
Beyond the contract ledger, the federal government’s primary disaster-response account showed signs of strain in the most recent records available. According to FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund monthly reporting and a Congressional Research Service analysis (R47676), the DRF carried an available balance of about $9.29 billion at the end of January 2026 after roughly $4.39 billion in obligations between mid-November and the end of January. The fund — tracked in detail on its USAspending.gov federal account page — draws most of its money from supplemental appropriations Congress passes after major disasters.
The records also indicate that fiscal 2026 appropriations lapsed twice, that FEMA obligated about $879 million from the fund during the initial lapse, and that on February 22, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security announced restrictions on certain Stafford Act activities to preserve unobligated balances. Those figures are several months old, and the balance may have shifted since; but with the Atlantic hurricane season now underway, the DRF’s balance and replenishment cadence are worth monitoring as a potential pressure point in the federal budget.
Patterns worth watching
Four patterns from this week’s records merit continued scrutiny. First, the distance between contract ceilings and obligated dollars — exemplified by the $500 million Vertex award against roughly $250,000 obligated — means headline procurement figures should be read with care, and greater transparency about expected task-order spending would help the public gauge true commitments. Second, the F-35’s cost curve continues to rise even as planned usage falls, a divergence GAO has flagged repeatedly and that the new $13.7 billion reset does not yet resolve.
Third, $186 billion in annual improper payments and as much as $251 billion in unrealized GAO-identified savings represent recurring sums that dwarf most discretionary line items, yet remain largely unaddressed year over year. And fourth, an emergency fund operating near its limits ahead of hurricane season is the kind of budget anomaly that tends to force costly, last-minute supplemental spending. The Investigative Journal will continue tracking these figures against their original sources; every dollar amount above is drawn from the public records linked throughout — the Department of War’s daily contract announcements, GAO reports, and FEMA, CRS, and USAspending.gov budget documents.