Wyden, Merkley, Colleagues Reintroduce Bipartisan Bill to Audit the Pentagon and End Wasteful Spending

Wyden, Merkley, Colleagues Reintroduce Bipartisan Bill to Audit the Pentagon and End Wasteful Spending

Senators: The Pentagon failed its eighth consecutive audit last year, unable to fully account for $4.65 trillion in assets

Washington D.C.-U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley today said they joined Senate colleagues in reintroducing legislation that would impose financial consequences if the Pentagon fails to pass a full, independent audit. Any Pentagon department that fails to achieve a clean audit would have 2% of its budget withheld and returned to the U.S. Treasury for deficit reduction.

"Taxpayers cannot keep writing blank checks for a Department of Defense that repeatedly fails to account for trillions of dollars in assets," Wyden said. "The Pentagon remains the only major federal agency incapable of passing a clean financial audit. It is long past time to enforce real financial consequences when the government mismanages taxpayer dollars. The Audit the Pentagon Act would hold the Defense Department to the basic standards of transparency and fiscal accountability that every other agency is expected to meet."

"The Pentagon routinely fails audits without consequences, enabling fraud, waste, and abuse," Merkley said. "This must come to an end. The American people deserve to know that their tax dollars are being spent efficiently."

Despite accounting for more than half of the federal government's discretionary spending and roughly two-thirds of all federal contracting activity, 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 and mandatory on an annual basis since 2018. In its eighth consecutive failed audit, which was released in December 2025 and covered $4.65 trillion in reported assets and $4.7 trillion in liabilities across all 50 states and more than 40 countries, the Pentagon Office of Inspector General identified 26 instances of the most severe auditing errors and two additional significant accounting issues in the department's internal controls over financial reporting.

Examples of waste and fraud at the Pentagon include:

• Almost $141 billion spent on a Northrop Grumman ballistic missile project that was supposed to cost $77 billion, and which is seven years behind schedule.
• More than $126 billion spent on a General Dynamics submarine program which has run $17 billion over cost. The per-sub cost has nearly doubled since 2019.
• More than $12 billion spent on one missile battery from Leidos and Dynetics that the Pentagon can't confirm works.
• More than $6 billion spent over 16 years on a Raytheon project to build a GPS system. The Pentagon cancelled the project in April due to "insurmountable" problems with its product.

Contrary to this record, Congress continues to expand the Pentagon's budget every year. The Trump administration's Fiscal Year 2027 budget request seeks approximately $1.15 trillion - the latest in a decades-long trend of rising Pentagon budgets that have never been matched by basic financial accountability. The Audit the Pentagon Act would finally hold the Pentagon accountable.

The legislation was reintroduced by U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. In addition to Wyden and Merkley, the legislation was cosponsored by U.S. Senators Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Cory Booker, D-N.J., Tina Smith, D-Minn., Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., Mike Lee, R-Utah, Rand Paul, R-Ky. and Chris Murphy, D-Conn.

The summary of the bill is here.

The full text of the bill is here.