OPINION:
President Trump has run six companies into bankruptcy: a casino, an airline, a steak company and several real estate ventures, among others. The guy couldn’t even sell water. Let that sink in.
For most businessmen, bankruptcy is a humiliation. For Mr. Trump, it was apparently a ribbon on his resume. After decades of proving he could light other people’s money on fire with remarkable efficiency, he discovered something even better than investors’ cash: yours.
Welcome to Washington, where the money never runs out, the accountability never arrives, and the shrimp cocktail is always on the house.
Nobody has embraced the spirit of taxpayer-funded excess quite like Pete Hegseth, Trump’s secretary of defense and the most reliable recurring character on “Saturday Night Live.” On the sketch comedy show, Mr. Hegseth is portrayed as a frat bro who stumbled into the Pentagon and immediately started treating it like a Vegas suite.
The writers, you will be unsurprised to learn, are barely exaggerating.
According to a recent analysis by the government watchdog Open the Books, the Defense Department spent $93 billion in the single month of September 2025 — the final month of the fiscal year. The spending was the highest single-month total for any federal agency since 2008.
Under Mr. Hegseth’s stewardship, the Pentagon managed to burn through $50.1 billion in just the last five days of September on grants and contracts. For context, that figure exceeds the entire annual defense budgets of Canada and Mexico combined. One assumes the Canadians are fine with regular furniture.
And what furniture it was. The Pentagon dropped $225 million on office furnishings, including $12,000 for fruit basket stands (apparently someone’s fruit was unsupported), $60,000 in Herman Miller recliners and a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the U.S. Air Force chief of staff’s home. Because nothing says “warfighting lethality” like a concert grand in the living room.
The food bill is where things get truly Dionysian. September’s Pentagon menu featured $6.9 million in Alaskan king crab, $2 million more in lobster tails and $15.1 million in rib-eye steaks — in a single month. The lobster tail, it turns out, is something of a Hegseth signature; the department spent over $7.4 million on it across March, May, June and October as well.
There was also $124,000 for ice cream machines and $139,224 on doughnuts, because the warriors defending democracy deserve dessert options. Weeks after this feast, millions of Americans lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
The animating logic behind all this is a federal budget rule so gloriously dysfunctional that a first-year MBA student would weep: “Use it or lose it.” Agencies that fail to exhaust their annual appropriations risk getting smaller budgets the following year. So they spend. Lavishly. Urgently. Unimaginatively. The Open the Books CEO put it diplomatically, noting that reform “is fully within the secretary’s control.”
Mr. Hegseth, who campaigned on the promise of a leaner, meaner military, responded by ordering more lobster.
And then there is Kristi Noem, former homeland security secretary, current “special envoy for The Shield of the Americas,” and perhaps the most spectacular self-promoter to have ever drawn a government paycheck.
Before being fired, Ms. Noem managed to spend $220 million of taxpayer money on what can be described only as a vanity advertising campaign starring herself — cowboy boots, gold Rolex and all.
The crown jewel of her tenure was a $143 million contract awarded to Safe America Media, a Delaware LLC incorporated eight days before winning the award. The company had no website, no prior government contracts and no identifiable headquarters. Asked by Congress where the company was located, Ms. Noem replied, under oath, “I don’t know.”
The work was subcontracted to a firm run by the husband of Ms. Noem’s own Homeland Security Department press secretary, whose office was listed as the funding source for the contracts. The call was coming from inside the house and was billed to the taxpayers for long-distance.
When congressional scrutiny intensified, Ms. Noem claimed that Mr. Trump personally authorized the $220 million self-promotion extravaganza. Mr. Trump promptly told reporters that he “never knew anything about it.”
When your boss contradicts your sworn testimony, your political obituary has already been filed. Ms. Noem was bounced shortly afterward.
The architects of this masterpiece of self-dealing will, of course, face no meaningful consequences. Ms. Noem got a fancy new title. The strategists will land on cable news. Only the career civil servants who were reportedly threatened into approving the contracts will face the investigators.
Mr. Trump promised to drain the swamp. He has instead redecorated it with Herman Miller recliners, Steinway pianos and $7.4 million in lobster tails. The man who bankrupted a casino has finally found a treasury he cannot exhaust.
Then again, he’s trying.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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