Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) used a Thursday morning social media post to demand immediate passage of legislation that would penalize the Pentagon for failing to account for how it spends taxpayer money, listing four specific programs he said have blown through their budgets by tens of billions of dollars combined. The post came as Sanders and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) formally reintroduced their bipartisan Audit the Pentagon Act, timed to a week in which the Department of Defense is seeking historic increases to its budget while American forces remain engaged in an ongoing war with Iran.
Sanders published the post on X at 10:42 a.m. on July 30, 2026. The full text of the post reads:
“Pentagon waste is costing taxpayers billions:
Ballistic missile project: $64B over budget
Submarines: $17B over budget
$12B missile battery that might not work
$6B GPS that took 16 years & got cancelled in April
Congress must pass my Audit the Pentagon Act NOW.”
The post was published the same morning Sanders’ Senate office released a formal announcement of the bill, giving fuller detail on each of the four examples cited and naming the defense contractors behind them.
The Bill and Its Bipartisan Backers
According to the press release from Sanders’ Senate office, the Audit the Pentagon Act would impose direct financial consequences on the Department of Defense for continuing to fail its audits. Under the legislation, any Pentagon component that does not achieve a clean audit opinion would have 2% of its budget withheld and redirected to the Treasury for deficit reduction.
The bill’s cosponsor list spans both parties. Joining Sanders and Grassley are Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), according to the release.
Sanders and Grassley’s Statements
In the press release, Sanders tied the bill directly to both the Pentagon’s financial record and the administration’s current military posture. “The Pentagon has been plagued by a massive amount of waste, fraud and financial mismanagement for decades,” Sanders said. “Year after year, the Pentagon fails an audit, and year after year, Congress hands it another blank check. At a moment when the administration has dragged us into an unconstitutional war with Iran and is demanding the largest military budget in our history to pay for it, the Pentagon still cannot tell us where trillions of dollars have gone. We have got to end the absurdity of the Pentagon being the only major federal agency that has never passed an independent audit.”
Grassley, a longtime co-author of the legislation across multiple Congresses, framed the bill as a matter of basic fiscal stewardship rather than an attack on defense spending itself. “America has the strongest military in the world and a mission to deliver peace through strength. National security is the number one responsibility of the federal government, and every dollar we spend to keep our country safe should be clearly accounted for. Yet, the Department of Defense has never received a clean audit opinion. Our bipartisan legislation holds the Defense Department accountable by ensuring it meets the same audit standards as other agencies, or it faces a financial penalty. Any dollar lost by the Department of Defense wastes taxpayers’ money and weakens our national security,” Grassley said.
The Four Programs Named in the Post
The press release detailed the same four examples Sanders cited in his X post, attaching contractor names and cost figures to each. It said the Pentagon has spent almost $141 billion on a Northrop Grumman ballistic missile project originally budgeted at $77 billion, a program the release said is now seven years behind schedule. It also pointed to more than $126 billion spent on a General Dynamics submarine program that has run $17 billion over cost, with the per-submarine price nearly doubling since 2019. The release further cited more than $12 billion spent on a single missile battery built by Leidos and Dynetics that the Pentagon “can’t even confirm works,” and more than $6 billion spent over 16 years on a Raytheon GPS project that was cancelled this past April due to what the release called “insurmountable” problems with its product. (
Background: An Eighth Consecutive Failed Audit
The push comes seven months after the Pentagon reported the results of its most recent department-wide audit. In a report released in December 2025, the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General found the agency had failed to achieve a clean audit opinion for the eighth consecutive year since Congress first mandated the annual reviews in 2018. Auditors examined roughly $4.65 trillion in reported assets and $4.7 trillion in liabilities spread across all 50 states and more than 40 countries, and identified 26 material weaknesses along with two significant deficiencies in the department’s internal financial controls, including unreported issues tied to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a statement accompanying the report that “the Department cannot resolve decades of war, neglect of America’s defense industrial base, and soaring national debt through unchecked spending,” while the department’s chief financial officer said it remains committed to achieving a clean audit opinion by 2028.
The Pentagon remains the only one of the federal government’s 24 major agencies to have never passed a clean financial audit, a requirement under federal law since the early 1990s that has been mandatory on an annual basis since 2018, according to the Sanders press release.
A Years-Long Bipartisan Effort
Thursday’s reintroduction is not the first time Sanders and Grassley have brought the legislation forward. The two senators have introduced versions of the Audit the Pentagon Act in prior sessions of Congress, including a 2023 push that would have required Pentagon components to pass an independent audit by fiscal year 2024 or forfeit 1% of their budgets to the Treasury. That version was introduced as the Pentagon’s budget climbed to $886 billion for fiscal 2024 under a debt-ceiling agreement, with Wyden, Warren, Lee, Merkley, Paul and Markey among the cosponsors at the time.
The Backdrop: Record Budget Requests Amid the Iran War
The renewed push lands against the backdrop of the largest defense budget request in modern American history. The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget, submitted earlier this year, seeks roughly $1.5 trillion in total defense resources, combining $1.15 trillion in base discretionary funding for the Department of War with an additional $350 billion sought through a separate budget reconciliation bill. Administration officials have said the increase, roughly 44% above the prior year’s funding level, is intended in part to help replace munitions expended during the war with Iran and to fund new initiatives such as the “Golden Dome” missile defense system.
Sanders has repeatedly linked his objections to Pentagon spending with his broader opposition to the war itself. Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on July 26, 2026, Sanders was asked how he could withhold support for emergency funding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said is needed to pay troops and restock munitions. “We need $67 billion to build housing, to make sure that all of our people have healthcare, that we deal with climate change, that we deal with a working class in this country that is struggling,” Sanders said. “The war in Iran is unconstitutional. It is illegal, should never have been started. We need to sit down, negotiate, end this war as quickly as possible.”
That same appearance saw Sanders note that both the House and Senate have separately passed war powers resolutions stating that continued U.S. military action against Iran without congressional authorization is illegal, even as the administration has continued to press for expanded funding for the conflict.
The Scale of the Accountability Gap
Government watchdogs have flagged the Pentagon’s financial management as a persistent risk for decades. The Government Accountability Office has listed Department of Defense financial management on its High-Risk List since 1995, and the department’s own inspector general reports have repeatedly cited breakdowns in recordkeeping across its sprawling network of bases, weapons programs and logistics operations. The Department of Defense accounts for more than half of the federal government’s discretionary spending and roughly two-thirds of all federal contracting activity, according to the Sanders press release, a scale that supporters of the audit bill argue makes independent verification of its books especially urgent.
What Comes Next
As with previous versions of the bill, the Audit the Pentagon Act faces an uncertain path through a Congress that has historically approved steadily rising defense budgets even as the Pentagon’s audit failures have continued year after year. The legislation would need to clear committee review and floor votes in both chambers before reaching the president’s desk, and previous iterations of the bill have not been signed into law. For now, Sanders and Grassley are betting that a bipartisan coalition and a public accounting of specific cost overruns — laid out in dollar figures on Sanders’ own social media feed — will build fresh pressure on lawmakers to act before the Pentagon’s budget grows any larger.