The Investigative Journal’s weekly survey of oversight reporting tracks what government watchdogs — official and independent, left and right — put on the public record. This week’s findings cluster around one theme: the cost and readiness of American defense spending, alongside fresh data on public-health enforcement, supply-chain dependence, and federal transparency. We note each organization’s orientation and funding so readers can weigh the source for themselves, and we link every claim to the original report.
1. GAO: Record-low F-35 readiness as the Pentagon seeks $13.7 billion more
Source orientation: The Government Accountability Office is the nonpartisan audit and investigative arm of Congress, led by the Comptroller General. It is funded by congressional appropriation and works at the direction of lawmakers.
In a report published June 11 (GAO-26-108113), GAO found that readiness for the F-35 — the Defense Department’s most expensive weapon system — has fallen to its lowest recorded levels. According to the report, the share of time the fleet was “full mission capable,” meaning able to perform all of its assigned missions, declined from 38 percent to 25 percent, while the broader “mission capable” rate dropped from 67 percent in fiscal 2021 to 44 percent in fiscal 2025.
GAO reported that the F-35 Joint Program Office has launched a new sustainment plan, the Global Support Solution Reset, which the office estimates will require roughly $13.7 billion more than previously planned through fiscal 2031. Auditors flagged significant risk to that plan: the program will depend on the private sector to deliver more than $7 billion in additional parts and material even as capacity constraints persist. Program officials told GAO that readiness will “likely worsen before it improves,” with measurable gains potentially not materializing until late 2026 or later.
The findings landed the same week the program’s leadership publicly acknowledged that the fleet has, in effect, outgrown its support system. The full report and GAO’s recommendations are available on the agency’s product page and in the complete 50-page document.
2. GAO: $1.2 billion to counter China, with no assessment of results
Source orientation: As above, GAO is Congress’s nonpartisan watchdog.
A second GAO report, released June 17 (GAO-26-107822), examined U.S. efforts to counter the influence of the People’s Republic of China abroad. GAO found that the State Department and USAID funded roughly 470 projects valued at nearly $1.2 billion between fiscal years 2020 and 2023, but that the agencies have not assessed the overall results of that portfolio.
Records reviewed by GAO indicate the data problems were basic: officials had to ask the bureaus and overseas posts managing the projects to compile information from scattered sources, producing incomplete and error-laden records. GAO made five recommendations, including that State require documented input from key participants on project proposals, maintain complete and current data on funded projects, and build a process for evaluating results across the portfolio.
The report adds an accountability dimension to a fast-growing area of foreign-policy spending; the House has separately advanced funding to expand such counter-influence programming. Coverage of the findings appeared in The Washington Times, and the underlying report is posted at gao.gov.
3. POGO: The “true” military budget may be $1.5 trillion to $2.3 trillion
Source orientation: The Project On Government Oversight is a nonpartisan good-government nonprofit founded in 1981 (originally the Project on Military Procurement). It is foundation- and donor-funded — grantmakers have included the David and Lucile Packard Foundation — and is generally viewed as left-of-center on defense-spending questions. This particular report was authored by David Vine, John Bellamy Foster, and Gisela Cernadas; Foster edits the socialist journal Monthly Review, a point we flag for transparency.
POGO’s June report, The True Total U.S. Military Budget, argues that the headline Pentagon figure understates what the United States actually spends to maintain its military. Using five different accounting methodologies that fold in spending spread across other agencies, the report estimates total 2025 military spending at between roughly $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion — and as high as about $2.3 trillion once interest attributable to past military borrowing is included.
The report’s base estimates range from about $1.48 trillion under the National Priorities Project approach to roughly $1.77 trillion under the Hartung/Smithberger methodology, with the figure reported by USAspending.gov falling near $1.72 trillion. These are analytical estimates, and the totals depend heavily on which categories an analyst counts as “military”; readers should treat the range as a function of methodology rather than a single audited number. Still, the work is a useful counterweight to budget debates that begin and end with the topline appropriation. The full methodology is published at pogo.org.
4. HHS-OIG and DOJ: 455 charged in a $6.5 billion health-care fraud sweep
Source orientation: The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General is a statutory, independent watchdog within HHS. This action was led by the Justice Department’s Health Care Fraud Unit with HHS-OIG, the FBI, the DEA, and state Medicaid Fraud Control Units.
The Justice Department announced its 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown in June, reporting charges against 455 defendants — including 90 doctors and other licensed medical professionals — in connection with more than $6.5 billion in allegedly false claims. Officials said the cases span 56 federal districts and 45 states and territories, with 50 state Medicaid Fraud Control Units participating, which the department described as the most in its history.
It is important to state plainly that these are allegations: the 455 defendants are charged, not convicted, and are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court. The government reported related civil and administrative actions alongside the criminal cases, including more than $182 million in seized cash and assets, over 1,400 provider exclusions, 48 civil settlements totaling roughly $73 million, and 25 HHS-OIG actions under the Civil Monetary Penalties Law seeking more than $10 billion in payments to the Medicare Trust Fund.
HHS-OIG has posted its own materials on the action at oig.hhs.gov. The figures illustrate both the scale of suspected fraud in federal health programs and the data-analytics approach investigators now use to target it.
5. ProPublica: Reading the genetic code of America’s measles outbreaks
Source orientation: ProPublica is a nonprofit investigative newsroom, generally regarded as left-of-center, funded primarily through philanthropy. Its founding gift came from the Sandler Foundation.
In a data investigation published June 10, ProPublica analyzed more than 1,800 whole-genome sequences of the D8 (DSID 9171) measles strain that has dominated North American cases since 2025. The outlet drew on sequences published to GenBank by the CDC and the Utah Public Health Laboratory and to the open platform Pathoplexus by the Public Health Agency of Canada, then traced genetic similarities to map how the virus moved between outbreaks in states such as Texas and Utah.
ProPublica documented its methodology in detail, including how it aligned variable-length sequences and filtered out incomplete ones, allowing readers and other researchers to scrutinize the analysis. The piece is a model of accountability journalism built on open public-health data rather than anonymous sourcing, and the underlying datasets it relied on remain publicly available through GenBank and Pathoplexus.
6. CRS: How dependent the U.S. is on China for critical minerals
Source orientation: The Congressional Research Service is the nonpartisan public-policy research arm of the Library of Congress. It works confidentially for Congress; its products reach the public through Congress.gov and third-party archives such as EveryCRSReport.com.
On June 8, CRS released a resource guide to help lawmakers navigate critical-minerals policy — the materials that underpin everything from smartphones to fighter jets — published as R48974, “Researching Critical Minerals: Selected Resources.” It complements CRS’s standing primer, “Rare Earth Elements and U.S. Supply Chains” (IF13171).
The CRS materials lay out the scale of U.S. dependence in stark terms: China mines roughly 60 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, processes and separates about 90 percent, and manufactures approximately 94 percent of rare-earth-based magnets, according to the figures CRS compiles. In 2025, the United States was about 67 percent net import-reliant for most rare earths, sourcing them from China, Malaysia, Estonia, and Japan. CRS also notes recent efforts to diversify, including a May 2025 memorandum of understanding between MP Materials and Saudi Arabia’s Ma’aden. The dependence data arrives as the Energy Department announced $134 million in June for projects to recover and refine rare earths from mine tailings and electronic waste.
7. Judicial Watch: FBI records from the Butler rally shooting
Source orientation: Judicial Watch is a conservative legal and open-records watchdog founded in 1994 and led by Tom Fitton. It is donor- and foundation-funded and pursues much of its work through Freedom of Information Act litigation.
Through a FOIA lawsuit, Judicial Watch obtained 48 heavily redacted FBI pages that, according to the group, indicate a SWAT officer recovered a “gray remote device” with an antenna from the pocket of Thomas Crooks — the gunman killed after the July 13, 2024, rally for then-candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania — after he was shot. The records, described on Judicial Watch’s case page, follow an audio recording of a 911 call placed by the shooter’s father that the group reported obtaining in May.
The documents establish what an officer reported recovering; they do not, on their own, establish the device’s function or significance, and that distinction matters. The release nonetheless adds to the public record on an event still under congressional and federal scrutiny. Separately, Judicial Watch’s broader 2026 transparency docket includes a FOIA lawsuit filed earlier this year against the Defense Department (No. 1:26-cv-00433) seeking pre-2019 gain-of-function and biodefense funding proposals submitted to DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office — a matter we flag as ongoing litigation rather than a finding.
8. OpenTheBooks: The Pentagon’s September spending rush and the transparency gap
Source orientation: OpenTheBooks (American Transparency) is a right-leaning fiscal-transparency nonprofit based in Illinois, founded by the late Adam Andrzejewski and now led by CEO John Hart. It posts disclosed government spending data and is donor-funded.
OpenTheBooks’ recent oversight work — published over the past year and continuing — has focused on the Defense Department’s “use-it-or-lose-it” budgeting, in which agencies rush to exhaust appropriations before the fiscal year ends. In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the group reported that the practice burned through roughly $79 billion in a single month, and tied the concern to a defense budget request approaching $1 trillion. (We note these figures reflect 2025 analyses and an ongoing campaign rather than a report issued this week.)
The organization has also pressed a broader transparency point that bears on every item in this roundup: according to its data, cited by Senator Joni Ernst in a September 2025 letter to the Office of Personnel Management, redactions of federal-employee information climbed from about 2,300 names in fiscal 2016 to more than 350,000 names and 281,000 locations by fiscal 2022. OpenTheBooks says an updated edition of its “Mapping the Swamp” workforce report, tracking through fiscal 2024, is forthcoming. The group’s argument — that the public should be able to see spending in close to real time — is the connective tissue of accountability journalism.
What warrants a closer look
Three threads from this week’s reporting merit deeper TIJ investigation. The first is the convergence of defense-spending oversight: GAO’s F-35 readiness findings, POGO’s estimate of a far larger true military budget, and OpenTheBooks’ documentation of year-end spending rushes all point to the same question — whether Congress can track defense dollars from appropriation to outcome. As fiscal 2027 appropriations take shape, TIJ intends to examine how completely the Pentagon’s spending is reported on USASpending.gov.
The second is the “results gap” GAO identified in the $1.2 billion China counter-influence portfolio. Spending that cannot be evaluated cannot be judged effective or wasteful; we will follow whether State and USAID adopt GAO’s five recommendations. A related, separate GAO report released June 23 (GAO-26-108186) found that the State Department reported nearly one-third of 311 international agreements to Congress late between October 2023 and March 2025; State concurred with five of GAO’s seven recommendations and did not concur with two — a transparency dispute worth tracking.
The third thread is one we offer with explicit caution. The conservative Capital Research Center — an investigative nonprofit founded in 1984 that researches the funding of advocacy groups — has said its researcher seeded a multi-part investigation, published beginning May 4 by the Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak, into the UNIK Foundation, an Ohio NGO. That reporting alleges the foundation accumulated more than $1 million in local, state, and federal grants amid questions about Medicaid-related billing. These are allegations, not adjudicated findings, and the organizations named are entitled to a response; TIJ would independently verify any grant flows through USASpending.gov and Ohio public records before drawing conclusions.
Methodology and right of reply: This roundup summarizes publicly available reports and links to each original source. Orientation labels are provided for reader context, not as endorsements or criticisms. Allegations are distinguished from findings, and pending matters are noted as such. Any organization or individual named here is invited to respond; TIJ will update this report with substantive replies. Quotations are kept brief under fair use, with analysis in our own words.