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pentagon budget
Resisting Hegseth's Destructive Vision for the US Military
Isn’t it finally time for a respectful national dialogue about what constitutes an adequate defense and how to balance military preparations with other urgent national needs?
Oct 01, 2025
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the former “Fox and Friends” cohost, claims to be obsessed with making the Pentagon and the military services about “the warfighter.” His main approach to doing so is a deeply misguided campaign to reduce “distractions” like commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (the dreaded “DEI”). No matter that the purpose of DEI is to combat White supremacist attitudes, misogyny, and anti-gay and anti-trans violence in the ranks.
All such forms of discrimination are, in fact, already present in the US military, and the way to build a cohesive defense force is certainly not by allowing them to run wild and be seen as acceptable or “normal” behavior. The best way to build a stronger, more unified military would, of course, be to make people feel welcome regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or gender identification. That would, in fact, be the only way to build a military that reflects the nation it’s charged with defending. DEI, after all, is not an irritating slogan. It’s an attempt to right historic wrongs in the service of a more effective military and a more unified populace. And it’s one thing to suggest that current approaches could be made more effective, but quite another to demonize them in the name of forging “better” warfighters.
In short, the Hegseth method is bound to prove destructive. Count on this, in fact: It will only weaken our military, not strengthen it. The result, if Hegseth’s efforts succeed, will indeed be a whiter, more aggressive armed forces, and quite likely one significantly more loyal to the current occupant of the Oval Office than to the Constitution.
Ex-Warriors for Peace
Thankfully, Hegseth’s vision is not shared by many of the veterans of America’s disastrous post-9-11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The eye-opening documentary What I Want You to Know presents the views of just such veterans about their service and about the meaning of the conflicts they fought in. Almost to a person (no, not “a man”!), they said the following four things:
- They don’t know why they were sent to the places where they fought.
- They did not believe the US could win the war they were sent to fight.
- Their government lied to them.
- They were forced to do things that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
It took courage for such veterans to go on camera and offer the unvarnished truth about the disastrous wars they helped to fight. They are, of course, far from alone, but as one of the producers of the film told me, many veterans are reluctant to discuss such feelings and insights publicly. Some don’t want to reflect on the idea that the wars they fought in were disastrously misguided and didn’t end in anything resembling an American victory. Others fear political retribution. Still others prefer to keep such conversations among their fellow vets, in large part because they feel that people who haven’t served can’t fully understand what they went through.
It’s little wonder that many vets keep their feelings about their long years in service within a close circle of friends and other veterans. But whether they choose to speak out publicly or not, a striking number of them are now either anti-war or “war skeptical,” questioning whether some of our recent conflicts were faintly worth fighting in the first place.
Don’t misunderstand me on this. There are indeed veterans speaking out against such unnecessary, unjust wars (past or future). Fifteen of them, for instance, contributed chapters to Paths of Dissent, a volume edited by Quincy Institute co-founder Andrew Bacevich and US Army veteran Daniel Sjursen. A description of a 2023 webinar marking the release of the book caught its main theme perfectly:
[T]hese soldiers vividly describe both their motivations for serving and the disillusionment that made them speak out against the system. Their testimony is crucial for understanding just how the world’s self-proclaimed greatest military power went so badly astray.
There are also entire organizations, including Veterans for Peace (VFP), Common Defense, and About Face: Veterans Against the War, devoted to ensuring that such endless wars remain over and crafting an American foreign policy grounded in diplomacy and defense rather than in a quest for global military dominance. (And, of course, they are distinctly not dedicated, like US President Donald J. Trump, to ever more regularly blowing boats out of the water in the Caribbean.)
Common Defense, in fact, goes beyond an anti-war stance to address the underlying ills that make such wars so much more likely. Its members describe themselves this way:
We are the largest grassroots membership organization of progressive veterans standing up for our communities against the rising tide of racism, hate, and violence. We vow to organize together against those who seek to divide us so they cannot rig our systems and economy for their own gain.
As for VFP, one of its members, Chris Overfelt, offered a succinct summary of the group’s stance in a 2019 House Budget Committee hearing organized by the Poor People’s Campaign: A Call for Moral Revival. He noted that he had “indirectly participated in the destruction of… Iraq and Afghanistan.” He then reflected on the consequences of those all-American wars, adding, “Neither of these countries will likely recover from that devastation in my lifetime. Nothing I can do… will make up for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan men, women, and children killed in these useless wars.”
About Face’s current campaign, “Keep the Military Off Our Streets,” reaches out to the 35,000 or more National Guard and military personnel that President Trump has already deployed to US cities and the Mexican border area, offering assistance in “exploring your options.” As that outfit puts it, “If you are a National Guardsperson or active-duty member and you’re concerned about the moral, ethical, or legal implications of your situation, you’re not alone.”
Nor is opposition to such fruitless, devastating conflicts limited to progressives. Trump himself used his 2016 election campaign to hammer Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton for supporting the disastrous 2003 US intervention in Iraq. And then there were statements like the one that he made at a September 2024 campaign stop in Mosinee, Wisconsin, in which he said, “I will expel the warmonger from our national security state and carry out a much needed cleanup of the military-industrial complex to stop the war profiteering and to put always America First.”
The president has, of course, not faintly fulfilled that pledge, but he said it for a reason—to appeal to those in his base who are sick of war and no longer trust corporations or traditional politicians to rein in the war machine.
One of the most interesting political collaborations of the past few years was when the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) teamed up with VoteVets, which describes itself as “a home for progressive veterans and their supporters.” The two groups worked together to repeal the authorization of military force, or AUMF, passed by Congress after the 9-11 attacks, a document that has been used ever since as a public rationale for numerous wars all over the globe. Dan Caldwell, the head of CVA at the time, explained how the two groups had come to work together in an interview on C-SPAN that included Will Fischer, then the director of government relations for VoteVets:
I honestly did go into the interview expecting a combative conversation… but when we started talking about foreign policy, it was clear there were some areas of alignment especially on war powers. The wheels started turning in my head, and we came together and decided to pursue some of these shared goals.
Perhaps most important right now, Major General Paul Eaton, who (among his many other assignments) served as commanding general in charge of reestablishing the Iraqi Security Forces in 2003-2004, has joined with other veterans to roundly criticize Trump’s deployment of troops to US cities. As he put it: “This [deployment of troops to US cities] is the politicization of the armed forces. It casts the military in a terrible light.”
Of course, there are also what might be thought of as warriors for war in this country, veterans who believe the US isn’t spending enough on its military or relying on force (or the threat of force) often enough. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ala.), a prominent voice on national security in the Republican Party, is all in on pushing for yet more Pentagon spending, the development of ever more and different kinds of nuclear weapons, and a quicker trigger for using force (including a possible war with Iran). Then there’s General Mike Minihan who, in January 2023, wrote a memo predicting that the US would be at war with China within two years. That was hardly an official US position. He was, in fact, publicly contradicting the stance of his commander-in-chief, and yet he was never held accountable for that rogue statement of his.
Military Invalidators
Many liberals and progressives feel that the only way to generate sustained public pressure against overspending on the Pentagon budget (now heading for the trillion-dollar mark) is to get military validators, ideally high-ranking officers, to weigh in. This was possible in the past, as in the Vietnam War years, when Admirals Gene Larocque and Eugene Carroll founded the Center for Defense Information, an indispensable resource for opponents of massive Pentagon budgets and misguided wars.
It’s important to remember, however, that the use of military validators can go terribly wrong. This was certainly the case in 1983 when President George W. Bush sent General Colin Powell, whose approval rating was then 20 points higher than his, to the United Nations in February 2003 to make a case for Iraq’s alleged (but, in fact, nonexistent) arsenal of nuclear weapons, a month before the US invaded that country. It was certainly good theater, but many of his points would prove to be sheer fantasy.
Although mid-level officers and those below them in the ranks are the likely backbone of a growing movement for peace and racial, gender, and economic justice, they simply can’t do it alone.
There were also prominent retired generals like Lee Butler and James Cartwright who called for sharp reductions in, or the total elimination of, all nuclear weapons globally, including the American arsenal. Butler, a former head of the US Strategic Air Command, signed a 1998 statement, organized by the group Global Zero, that called for the elimination of nuclear weapons globally. And Cartwright, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former commander of United States nuclear forces, endorsed a 2012 report by Global Zero arguing that nuclear deterrence could be maintained with a far smaller US nuclear arsenal of 900 total warheads, versus the current stockpile of thousands of them, either deployed or in reserve.
But high-level military officers able and willing to criticize Donald Trump’s current global strategy and this country’s still rising military spending levels are an ever-shrinking cohort. Little wonder, given that, as a Quincy Institute report found, 80% of all three- and four- star generals who retired in a recent five-year period went to work for—yes, of course!—the arms industry in one capacity or another.
And although mid-level officers and those below them in the ranks are the likely backbone of a growing movement for peace and racial, gender, and economic justice, they simply can’t do it alone, even if their voices are crucial for reaching certain key audiences.
And here’s a reality of this moment: Given the torrent of threats to basic rights now emanating from Washington, movements of resistance need all the help they can get. In that grim context, anti-war veterans will certainly be crucial allies in the struggle for peace and justice, but there will also have to be a cultural and psychological shift, weaning many Americans from their attraction to war as a way to solve problems and their sense of themselves as citizens of “the most powerful country in the world.”
America’s “increasingly dysfunctional relationship to war” is analyzed in detail in 26-year Army veteran Gregory Daddis’s new book, Fear and Faith: America’s Relationship with War Since 1945. He believes that this country’s “martial bonds… have been informed by deep-seated frictions between faith in and fear of war and its consequences.” In his concluding chapter, “War for War’s Sake,” Daddis underscores the stubborn commitment to war that prevails among many Americans, despite the costly and disastrous wars of this century. “War,” he writes, “remains with us because we have inherited Cold War tendencies toward viewing the world in black-and-white terms, where every threat seems existential to the global American project… America’s faith never truly wavered, even after the debacle in Vietnam. Calls for military crusades against evil still resonate.”
Daddis believes that “a twisted relation with faith and fear, if left unbroken, can only preordain the nation to a militarized way of life bounded by the grimness of war.”
In light of the devastating impact of America’s post-9-11 wars, as documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University—the loss of $8 trillion, hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, millions of people driven from their homes, and hundreds of thousands of US veterans suffering physical wounds or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—calls for “peace through strength” and ever higher Pentagon budgets should ring increasingly hollow.
Isn’t it finally time for a respectful national dialogue about what constitutes an adequate defense and how to balance military preparations with other urgent national needs? Of course, having any such conversation, given the present deep divisions in American society, will be a challenge in its own right. But the alternative is a continuation of some variation of the devastating wars of the post-9-11 period, and such new and perilous conflicts will involve boots on the ground, air strikes, or the endless arming of repressive regimes.
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Why Does the Pentagon Seem to Be Spending More for Less?
One has to wonder how on Earth the Pentagon needs more money to not fight wars than it did to fight two of them at the same time.
Sep 04, 2025
As US Congress returns from its summer recess, Washington’s attention is turning toward a possible government shutdown.
While much of the focus will be on a showdown between Senate Democrats and President Donald Trump, a subplot is brewing as the House and Senate, led by Republicans but supported by far too many Democrats, fight over how big the Pentagon’s budget should be. The House voted to give Trump his requested trillion dollar budget, while the Senate is demanding $22 billion more.
To justify this historic largesse, both Trump and Congress give the same reason: peace through strength. Harkening back to Ronald Reagan’s Cold War military spending spree, today its invocation often boils down to one simple idea: Give the Pentagon more money. But, since Reagan’s famed buildup actually cost much less, it's worth asking if the problem really is a lack of funds
Four decades ago, the newest aircraft carrier in the fleet was the USS Theodore Roosevelt. It was a remarkable acquisition project coming in a full 16 months early and more than $80 million under budget. Today, the latest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. And even after adjusting for inflation, the Ford class carriers are also much more expensive than the Nimitz class they are replacing, and costs may keep going up. And those costs come before even asking if the ships are actually matched to the military’s current needs, let alone for the decades ahead they’ll be in use.
Sadly, this cost explosion and questionable alignment with modern warfare are far from unique to carriers. A quick Google search for the F-35, Littoral Combat Ship, Sentinel ICBM, or any number of other recent boondoggles tells the same story. Today, nearly every Pentagon acquisition program is a mess, coming in late, over budget, and significantly more expensive than the weapons and platforms being replaced.
This collapse into dysfunction of the Pentagon’s procurement system cannot be ascribed to a lack of funding. Despite a genuine drop in spending following the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon is now nearly two and a half decades into an unprecedented era of massive budgets. More money hasn’t solved this problem, and there’s zero reason to think even more will do anything but make it worse.
Before going further, it’s worth examining two of the most common justifications for why costs have skyrocketed: technology and personnel.
There’s a decent chance you’re reading this on a smartphone like the iPhone, a remarkable encapsulation of just how dramatically technology has increased in power and decreased in costs over the past 40 years. In 1985, the CRAY-2 was the world’s most powerful super computer. It cost between $35-50 million (adjusted for inflation) and weighed nearly 3 tons. Instead, that iPhone in your hand weighs a few ounces, costs around $1,000, and is thousands of times more powerful. Oh, and it also makes phone calls, plays music, takes photos and videos, lets you surf the internet, and much more.
When you put it all together, Washington has some tough questions to ask about the Pentagon’s budget, and one of those questions should not be, “Can we add $22 billion more?”
Put another way, you have far more computing power in your pocket than the entire US military did four decades ago, and you didn’t even need a multi-billion-dollar spending spree to get it. Yet somehow, every time someone tries to explain why the Pentagon needs a trillion dollars today, the inevitable answer is the role of advanced technology in today’s military. Is technology more ubiquitous and more complex? Unquestionably. It is also outrageously more powerful and cheaper today than it was 40 years ago. Reagan’s military wasn’t sailing tall ships and using an abacus. They bought most of those supercomputers and utilized some of the most sophisticated technology of the time.
Yet somehow, while the rest of us have cheap supercomputers in our pocket, the Pentagon’s spending more than ever.
Of course, the Pentagon doesn’t just buy things; it is the largest employer in the United States, and, so the justification for more money goes, those people cost more today than they used to. Let’s start with acknowledging two facts: Military personnel have seen real and meaningful increases in their pay and benefits over the past 40 years; and also their compensation, particularly among the lower ranks, remains woefully low and should be raised further.
But what’s also true is that the size of the armed forces under Trump is significantly smaller than those under Reagan. In 1985, there were 2.15 million active-duty personnel with another 1.1 million civilians supporting them. Today, those numbers are more than one-third smaller. So, while one can justify some budget pressure by the increasing costs per person due to better pay and benefits, any honest math would have to also account for significant cost savings of a smaller workforce both in and out of uniform. Today, we’re simply paying more for a far smaller military and civilian workforce than 40 years ago. Since in Washington, “more” is never enough, we’re left to wonder what happened to the savings of a smaller workforce utilizing ever cheaper technology?
It’s worth adding into the equation what the military is actually doing. There is no doubt that a wartime military costs more than one at peace. At the center of today’s calls for a larger budget is thus, the so-called “return of great power competition,” with the US-China rivalry at its core. Add in a resurgent and aggressive Russia, ongoing crises in the Middle East, and other challenges like North Korea, and the Pentagon’s boosters say the threat environment is simply far more complex and involved than 40 years ago.
Accepting that logic, however, requires one to dramatically downplay the complexity of the Cold War, which of course was only “cold” if you leave out conflicts like Afghanistan, Central America, and the Iraq-Iran War. There was also US support for brutal dictators like Mobutu, Pinochet, and Suharto and their armed forces. Today’s threat environment is no doubt complex, but Reagan hardly oversaw a time of cheap, global peace.
Trump’s trillion-dollar budget is also coming in far larger than those of the recent past when the US was actively fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with as many as 200,000 uniformed personnel deployed in theater simultaneously. While the US undoubtedly maintains a not-insignificant operational tempo across the Middle East and North Africa today, it is a far cry from those peak war years.
One has to wonder how on Earth the Pentagon needs more money to not fight wars than it did to fight two of them at the same time.
When you put it all together, Washington has some tough questions to ask about the Pentagon’s budget, and one of those questions should not be, “Can we add $22 billion more?” How will more money fix a completely broken acquisition process? What happened to savings from cheaper technology and a smaller military? And why exactly are the military’s missions of the future so much more expensive than the past? Ultimately, if we want our nation to experience either peace or strength, it's going to take answering those, and other, questions, not just an ever larger fortune for the Pentagon.
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Is the Pentagon Spending Taxpayer Money on Alien Tech?
Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Congress must hold the DOD accountability for how it uses its funds.
Aug 31, 2025
The US federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming nearly half of the discretionary budget.
As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued “Greenbacks,” as Abraham Lincoln’s government did. But I have written on that before (see here and here), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense (DOD).
Under the Constitution, the military budget should not be paid at all, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Expenditures of public funds without a public accounting violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which provides:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
The Pentagon failed its seventh financial audit in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets—approximately $2.58 trillion—untracked. From 1998 to 2015, it failed to account for $21 trillion in spending.
As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. US President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
President John F. Kennedy echoed that concern, warning in 1961 that “secret societies” and excessive secrecy are “repugnant in a free and open society,” threatening democracy by withholding truth from the public. He warned that excessive concealment, even for national security, undermines democracy by denying citizens the facts needed to hold power accountable. “No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed,” he said. If untracked billions fund classified programs, citizens are left powerless, governed by a shadow entity answerable to no one.
Those concerns persist today. On August 13, 2025, Joe Rogan interviewed US Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who leads a House Oversight Committee focused on government transparency regarding various topics, including UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs). Luna said the committee had been formed after she and two other congresspeople were denied access at Eglin Air Force Base to information on UAPs provided by whistleblowers. The problem, she said, was that Congress was supposed to represent the public and be an investigative body for it, “and you have unelected people operating basically in secrecy… I think this goes all the way back even to JFK, with how they basically have operated outside of the purview of Congress and basically… have gone rogue…”
A Behemoth Without Oversight
The Department of Defense’s $885.7 billion budget for 2025, approved by the House of Representatives, dwarfs the military spending of China ($296 billion), Russia ($84 billion), and the next eight nations combined. Managing $4.1 trillion in assets—from aircraft carriers to secret drones—along with $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g. personnel costs and pensions), the federal government’s largest agency oversees a military empire spanning over 4,790 sites worldwide. Yet it operates with minimal oversight.
The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 mandated audits for all federal agencies, but the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 delayed the Pentagon’s first department-wide audit to 2018 due to its unwieldy size, its decentralized systems, and its outdated software. The DOD has failed every audit since that time. In 2024, it could not account for its $824 billion FY 2024 budget, with 2,500 new audit issues identified. Of 24 reporting entities, only nine received clean opinions, while 15 received disclaimers due to insufficient data. In fact the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged DOD financial management as high-risk for waste, fraud, and abuse ever since 1995.
A 2016 report in The Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.
As observed in a January 2019 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, openly secret budgets were first legalized in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted that newly created agency from public financial disclosure. The act stated, “The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations related to the expenditure of Government funds.”
The aim of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was to curb billions of dollars said to be lost each year through fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of public budgets. Despite the mandated audits for all federal agencies, the DOD—the only major agency without a clean audit—has received $3.9 trillion in congressionally approved funding since 2018. “Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached,” observed federal budgeting expert Lindsay Kosgharian, “they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.”
The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023, backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), proposes docking 0.5–1% of budgets for audit failures, but the measure has not received a vote.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched with promises to strip waste, fraud, and abuse from federal agencies, has conspicuously sidestepped the Pentagon. A June 2025 article titled “Why DOGE Was Always Doomed: The Pentagon Problem,” points out that the DOGE mission was seriously hampered by the Pentagon’s exemption from auditing:
In FY 2024, total discretionary spending was about $1.6 trillion. Of that, the Pentagon alone received $842 billion. In other words, it got more funding than all other departments combined. You read that right: one (very special) department received more than all the rest put together.
Funds that are not accounted for divert resources from critical needs like troop readiness, healthcare, and infrastructure. Overbilling by contractors enriches corporations while taxpayers foot the bill. And the lack of transparency erodes public confidence, as Americans struggle with domestic priorities.
The Missing $21 Trillion: Fraud, Waste, or Something Worse?
The Pentagon’s audit failures mask not just inefficiency and waste but pervasive fraud and corruption. Between 1998 and 2015, Inspector General reports show that the DOD could not account for $21 trillion in spending—65% of federal spending during that period. For perspective, the entire US GDP in 2015 was $18.2 trillion. In 2023, the agency failed to document 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets, up from 61% the prior year. A 2015 DOD report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste was suppressed to protect budget increases.
There is plenty of verified waste to support the case for mismanagement. Military contractors, who receive over half of the Pentagon’s budget, are a major culprit. The F-35 program, managed by Lockheed Martin, was reported in 2021 to be $165 billion over budget, with $220 billion in spare parts poorly tracked. A 2023 CBS News investigation found that contractors routinely overcharged by 40-50%, with some markups reaching 4,451%. A 2016 report in The Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.
It is no longer even necessary to cover up fraud and corruption by wildly inflated prices. In 2017, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official Catherine Austin Fitts collaborated with Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University, to document the missing $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments at the DOD and HUD. In a June 2025 article published in Fitts’ journal The Solari Report titled “Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting?,” Dr. Skidmore discussed how the government responded to the publication of his research with Fitts. Its response was to immediately eliminate the paper trail leading to its covert financial operations. In particular: “Pentagon officials turned to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) for advice. Several months later, FASAB posted a new document (FASAB 56), which recommended that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds to conceal expenditures if it is deemed necessary to protect national security interests.”
Fitts remarked, “The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury, and announced to every private army, mercenary, and thug in the world that we are open for business.”
Speculation Run Rampant
In a widely-viewed interview by Tucker Carlson on April 28, 2025, Fitts expressed her belief that the missing trillions had been funneled into classified projects involving advanced technologies, including massive underground bunkers to protect elites from a “near-extinction event;” and that they were using advanced energy systems and hidden transit networks possibly linked to extraterrestrial tech. She discussed “interdimensional intelligence” and a secret space program linked to a “breakaway civilization.” The latter term was coined by UFO researcher Richard Dolan and is defined by Google as “a theoretical, hidden society that operates outside of mainstream civilization with advanced technology, often linked to UFO phenomena and secret space programs.”
In a Danny Jones interview in May 2025, Fitts alluded to Deep Underground Military Bases (“DUMBs”), perhaps used for “advanced technology or off-world operations.” Existence of these bases was confirmed two decades earlier by whistleblower Philip Schneider, a US government geologist and engineer involved in their construction. In his last presentation in 1995, Schneider said there were 131 of these cities connected underground by mag-lev rail, built at a cost of $17-26 billion each. According to his biographer, Schneider was assassinated in 1996 by a US intelligence agency for disclosing the government cover-up of UFOs and aliens.
Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Are we dealing with a scenario like that in such Hollywood movies as the 1997 film Men in Black, in which hidden forces—human or alien—control our fate?
As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government.
The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contends that no verifiable evidence supports extraterrestrial activity. But other prominent figures support the UFO-UAP narrative. In 2017, the New York Times exposed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), said to be a $22 million DOD initiative run by Luis Elizondo investigating UAPs from 2007-2012.
According to BBC News, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s space security program, claimed in a 2020 interview with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the US government has an “agreement” with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials. He alleged aliens have been in contact with the US and Israel, with secret underground bases where they collaborate on experiments. Eshed claimed the United States was on the verge of disclosing this under President Donald Trump but withheld it to avoid “mass hysteria.” The claims were unverified but provocative.
In recent years, Congress has increased its focus on UAPs, with high-profile hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, whistleblower David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified that the US possesses “non-human origin” craft and “dead pilots,” based on classified briefings. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee’s hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” featured testimony from Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and former NASA official Michael Gold, who claimed the US possesses UAP technologies and has harmed personnel in secret retrieval programs. Shellenberger alleged that a covert “Immaculate Constellation” program hides UAP data from Congress.
Some lawmakers, including Rep. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), continue to criticize Pentagon secrecy and to push for transparency. In May 2024, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, requiring the declassification of all UAP-related documents within 270 days. He stated:
This bill isn’t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it’s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people. I’m sick of hearing bureaucrats telling me these things don’t exist while we’ve spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studying them for decades.
Secrecy Undermines Democracy
With $21 trillion unaccounted for historically, $165 billion in F-35 overruns, and $125 billion in buried waste, the DOD’s financial mismanagement needs urgent reform. Congress is primarily responsible for overseeing the DOD budget, exercising its constitutional “power of the purse” under Article 1 of the US Constitution. So why isn’t it enforcing this mandate?
The chief excuse given is the need for secrecy for security reasons, but a congressional committee could be given access to the Pentagon’s financial data in closed session in order to exercise public oversight and enforce accountability. Other factors are obviously at play, including political influence, lobbying, campaign contributions from the defense sector, and a lack of penalties for noncompliance.
To restore accountability, Congress needs to enforce the Audit the Pentagon Act, modernize DOD systems, and investigate contractors profiting from lax oversight. UAP transparency is also critical, whether to debunk myths or uncover truths.
As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government. The Pentagon’s secrecy and lack of accountability could be shielding anything from contractor fraud to UAP programs and alien alliances. If there is information so secret that even our elected representatives don’t have access to it, who does have access? Is there a secret government above the government we know? Without fiscal transparency and accountability, we can no longer call ourselves a democracy, as JFK warned.
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