Pete Hegseth's Taxpayer-Funded Luxury Shopping Spree Is Even Crazier Than You Can Imagine

United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (who also goes by the secondary title "Secretary of War") has been a controversial figure long before he was first nominated for the position by President Donald Trump in 2024. But amid Hegseth's numerous polarizing statements and the military escalations in Venezuela and Iran, it's easy for a less-global issue to get lost in the mix of public scrutiny. One such story is the defense secretary's taxpayer-funded spending spree on a variety of questionable goods and services in late 2025. On March 9, 2026 Open The Books — a non-profit transparency organization that tracks annual Pentagon spending — published an analysis of Department of Defense (DoD) 2025 expenditures, revealing that a whopping $93.4 billion was spent on various contracts and grants in September of that year.

The report also showed that military spending has seen end-of-fiscal-year spikes every September, regardless of the administration. That said, looking at Open The Books' dataset (which dates back to 2007), September 2025 was easily the priciest month yet for American taxpayers. Hegseth and his team spent more than $50.1 billion in the last five days of that month alone, but what's even more wince-worthy is the crazy list of things all that money went to. Considering taxpayer dollars are already a hot topic amid the Medicare cuts of 2025 and other funding freezes, it's worth taking a closer look at this DoD spending spree.

It's the department's purchases under Hegseth that are really raising eyebrows and calling into question why so much American taxpayer money is allocated to the military every year. In the same month his department was renamed the "Department of War," at a cost that could balloon to $2 billion, Hegseth's Pentagon spent $5.9 billion on IT and telecommunications expenses (including $3.5 billion on cable TV and tech support). It also spent a record $6.6 billion on purchases from foreign entities.

Still, it's the over $25 million spent on luxury foods in September 2025 that has spurred bipartisan criticism. This includes $15.1 million on ribeye steak, $1 million on salmon, $6.9 million on lobster tail, and $2 million on Alaskan king crab. For the record, this was the third time in 2025 that the military spent over $2 million on the luxury crab dish, and the fifth time overall under President Trump. According to Open The Books, the only other time in history that the military spent this much on king crab in a single month was in February 2021, under President Joe Biden and then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. But in addition to luxury main courses, Hegseth's DoD also spent $139,224 on donuts and $12,540 on fruit basket stands, plus an additional $124,000 on ice cream machines and $26,000 on sushi preparation tables — again, all in September 2025.

U.S. military spending already dwarfs that of every other nation in the world by a landslide, and some aspects of it — such as paying for overpriced food and furnishings — could be seen by some as a waste of money for America. An important factor to call out here is the U.S. government's "use-it-or-lost-it" policy, a rule that encourages the Pentagon to spend its entire budget by the end of each fiscal year or risk seeing reduced funding the following year. As Open The Books' analysis shows, this rule has resulted in spending sprees every September, a month when the federal government's fiscal year draws to a close. However, with Hegseth's DoD spending totaling almost $100 billion in September 2025, that month's spending spree exceeded the previous September averages of $62.4 billion (since 2008) by more than $30 billion.

As of March 18, 2026, Hegseth has not issued any public statement on the matter. President Trump has meanwhile proposed increasing the DoD's 2027 budget to $1.5 trillion, up from the 2026 budget of $901 billion. The U.S spent $919 billion on the military in fiscal year 2025.