While the NY Times frames things, often using the word “suggest”, to suggest everything is more or less normal, the abnormality of our criminal regime continues unabated.
Secretary of Maximum Lethality, Pete “War is Hell” Hegseth, spent over $93,000,000,000 in use it or lose it funds in September 2025, with no blowback. Hey, if he didn’t spend it all … it would have been waste, (not to mention abuse and fraud). On the other hand, Representative Nancy Mace, by signing a petition that allowed for the possibility of humiliation for Trump, simply for the fact that he loves beautiful women as much as Jeffrey Epstein did, and often they were on the younger side, (it is said) opened herself to a House Ethics Committee investigation of a $9,500 alleged overpayment to herself for her housing in Washington DC. Fair is fair. Nazis will be Nazis. Here’s Heather:
That argument [that Congress has the sole power to declare war and allocate funds for war] is potent again almost 250 years later. Democrats are calling out that Trump is spending $1 billion a day in his attacks on Iran but that he slashed through government programs that help Americans, claiming the need to address the country’s ballooning national debt. Just yesterday, Berkeley Lovelace Jr. of NBC News reported that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administration official overseeing the Affordable Care Act, says that many of those enrolled in healthcare under the law should not be there. About 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage this year, down by more than 1.2 million from last year. Oz anticipates cutting another 4 million off the rolls as he targets “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
And yet, as Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling of The New Republic noted last night, according to a report from government watchdog Open the Books, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew through $93.4 billion in September 2025 alone, with more than $50 billion going out in the last five days of the month alone.
To spend the entirety of the defense budget, rather than lose it, Pentagon officials bought “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.) In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.”
In October, Houghtaling noted, the administration said it could not fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, because the government had shut down. Millions of Americans lost food benefits. source
Waste, fraud and abuse for thee, well-deserved perks for me!
That $1 billion a day figure for Trump’s war in Iran might be a little bit low, maybe by 100% or so. The New York Times reports:
The most transparent administration in US history, it was revealed, has more good news for the citizens:
There are major societal implications for that war. It is already costing at least $1 billion a day, and administration officials have suggested they are going to ask Congress for more money for it. That request will come on top of the news of March 10 that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. has borrowed $1 trillion over the past five months—that’s $50 billion a week on average—as Trump’s tax cuts slash revenue. source
Admittedly, some Iranian children (and others) are being killed, a DOD “preliminary” investigation shows that the missile that hit the girls’ school on Day One was an American one; the most unstable region on Earth has been radically destabilized, apparently at the behest of the rightwing expansionist Prime Minister of Israel, who stayed with the Kushner’s when Bibi was here in college; and there is a widespread effort across the government to cover up crimes in many departments of the federal government, as well as ethical violations, (which are a thing of the past, if done by good people); and the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by President Trump, is being actively thwarted by the his former criminal and impeachment attorneys who now run the Department of Justice; and Trump is quietly borrowing 50 billion a week to fund all this, BUT — there’s really nothing to see here.
The US Department of Obstruction of Justice, in conjunction with the Department of Maximum Lethality, the Department of Destruction of Public Education and “History” Erasure, and the president’s taskforce on Why Are Blacks and Dead People Still Allowed to Vote, have issued a joint statement. It reads, in full, “Sir YES, sir!”
Recent polling suggests that everything is still completely normal here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
gratuitousblahg 