This week, the President signed an executive order establishing a task force to eliminate fraud. It targets welfare recipients, immigrants, and state benefit programs. It does not mention the Pentagon. The Pentagon just set the all-time spending record.

GM, Welcome Back to the Dead Drop.

Two things happened this week. I need you to hold them side by side.

On March 16, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud within the Executive Office of the President. Vice President JD Vance is Chairman. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson is Vice Chairman. The task force pulls together Treasury, Justice, Agriculture, Labor, HHS, HUD, Education, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, SBA, and the Office of Management and Budget. Member agencies have 30 days to identify their most fraud-susceptible transactions. Sixty days to adopt minimum anti-fraud requirements. Ninety days to submit measurable implementation plans.

That is a serious operational framework. If you read nothing else, you would think the administration had declared total war on every dollar of fraud in the federal government.

Then you read where the guns are pointed.

The executive order names Minnesota by name, multiple times. It cites the Feeding Our Future scandal, where operators stole nearly $250 million intended to feed children. It references Medicaid fraud "that could total in the billions." It notes that 9% of Minnesota's annual food stamp spending is estimated to be spent in error. It specifically calls out "an organized ring of Somali immigrants" in connection with childcare fraud. It names California, Illinois, New York, Maine, and Colorado as states where similar problems likely exist. It accuses 21 states of suing to block the federal government from conducting eligibility reviews.

Every target points downward. Welfare recipients. Immigrants. State benefit programs. Daycare operators. Food stamp fraud.

Now hold the second thing.

Days before the executive order was signed, government watchdog Open the Books published its analysis of Pentagon spending for September 2025. The Department of Defense spent $93.4 billion on grants and contracts in a single month. No federal agency has spent that much in one month since at least 2008. In the last five business days of September alone, the Pentagon burned through $50.1 billion. That is more than the entire annual defense budget of Israel. More than Italy's. Only nine countries on earth spend that much on their military in a full year.

The Pentagon spent it in a week.

The shopping list reads like satire. $2 million in Alaskan king crab, the ingredient Fortune magazine recently crowned the new caviar. $6.9 million in lobster tail. $15.1 million in ribeye steak. $1 million in salmon. 272 separate orders of doughnuts totaling $139,224. $124,000 in ice cream machines. $26,000 in sushi preparation tables.

$225.6 million in furniture, the highest total since 2014, including $60,719 worth of premium Herman Miller chairs and $12,540 in three-tiered fruit basket stands. A $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano, delivered to the home of the Air Force chief of staff. A $26,000 violin. A $21,750 custom handmade flute from the Japanese luxury brand Muramatsu. $5.3 million in Apple devices, including 400 iPad Air M3 tablets purchased at $788 each when the same model retails for $499. A 98-inch Samsung monitor with "crystal UHD display" for $4,000.

$111,497 in footrests. $3,160 in stickers featuring Dora the Explorer, Frozen, and Paw Patrol.

And for good measure, $19.3 million in garbage collection. All that shopping left a mess.

The Pentagon is not mentioned in the executive order. Not a word. Not a line. The Department of Defense is not among the agencies listed as task force members. The largest single-month expenditure in modern federal history is invisible to the administration's anti-fraud apparatus.

This executive order did not arrive in a vacuum. It is the latest in a series of escalating promises that make the Pentagon's absence even more striking.

On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, led by Elon Musk. The stated mission: modernize IT, maximize productivity, cut excess spending. Musk promised $2 trillion in savings. That number was later reduced to $1 trillion, then to $150 billion, less than a tenth of the original promise. A Senate minority report calculated that DOGE had actually generated $21.7 billion in waste through mass layoffs, deferred resignation payments, and disrupted operations. Musk left DOGE in May 2025, calling the effort "a little bit successful" and saying he would not do it again.

On January 8, 2026, Vice President Vance stood at the White House podium and announced the creation of a new DOJ Division for National Fraud Enforcement. A Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General would lead it. The DOJ had already issued 1,500 subpoenas and 100 indictments.

On February 24, 2026, President Trump stood before a joint session of Congress and declared: "I am officially announcing the war on fraud, to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance." He added: "And if we're able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight."

The next morning, Vance launched his first salvo: suspending $259 million in Medicaid reimbursements to Minnesota. CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz announced that if the state failed to implement a corrective action plan within 60 days, deferred payments would reach $1 billion by year's end. The fraud case he referenced was originally uncovered and prosecuted by the Biden administration.

The message, from DOGE to the DOJ division to the State of the Union to the executive order signed today, has been consistent and loud: this administration will hunt down every dollar of waste, fraud, and abuse.

Except at the Pentagon. Where the hunting never starts.

The Pentagon's September spending is not a scandal of corruption. It is something worse. It is a system designed to waste money, operating exactly as intended.

Federal "use-it-or-lose-it" rules require agencies to spend their entire budget by the end of the fiscal year or forfeit the remainder and risk reduced funding the following year. The incentive is not subtle: spend everything, no matter what, or lose it. Since 2008, the Pentagon has averaged $62.4 billion in September grants and contracts, compared to $28.9 billion in other months. September spending routinely more than doubles the norm.

September 2025 broke the record by $30 billion over the historical average.

Research published in the American Economic Review found that from 2004 to 2009, the federal government spent 23% of its entire IT budget in the last week of September. Those rushed purchases were 5.7 times more likely to receive a "low quality" score from government evaluators. The private sector noticed. Hewlett-Packard instructed its salesforce: "Did you know that 8.7% of federal government spending will occur in this last week? Contact your government customers and take advantage of the federal spending rush." The CEO of Govly, an AI company serving defense contractors, called September 30 "Amazon Prime Day for the federal government."

The Constitution already provides a fix. Article 1, Section 8 states that funding "to raise and support armies" can be used for up to two years after appropriation. The one-year deadline is administrative policy, not constitutional mandate. It could be changed by the same Congress that just raised the defense budget to $1.5 trillion.

Nobody changes it because the system benefits the people who run it. Contractors plan revenue cycles around the September surge. Consultants time their sales campaigns to exploit it. Bureaucrats protect future budgets by burning through current ones. And no executive order, no task force, no war on fraud has ever been aimed at it.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stood in front of military personnel on September 30, 2025 and told them it was "completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon." His department had just finished spending $2 million on king crab and putting a Steinway grand piano in a general's living room.

Hegseth has said repeatedly that his mission is to "refocus on warfighting and lethality." The king crab purchases were the fifth time the Pentagon under Trump had spent $2 million or more on king crab in a single month. Three times in 2025 alone. The lobster spending was not isolated either: in four separate months of 2025, the Pentagon spent more than $7.4 million on lobster tail. That had previously happened only once in history.

Five months after the shopping spree, the United States launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. The Pentagon's own preliminary estimate puts the war at $1 billion per day. CSIS calculated that $3.5 billion of the first 100 hours was unbudgeted. Penn Wharton projects a two-month conflict could cost between $40 billion and $95 billion in direct military expenditures, with total economic impact reaching as high as $210 billion.

The Pentagon spent September buying a concert piano for a general's home. Five months later, it went to war with an unbudgeted tab. Open the Books CEO John Hart put it plainly: "We need to focus on replenishing interceptors, not appetizers."

Meanwhile, the Pentagon also set a record for foreign purchases: $6.6 billion from foreign governments and foreign-owned businesses in September, breaking the previous high by $1.4 billion. This from an administration that has made increasing American manufacturing a centerpiece of its economic agenda and placed tariffs on foreign goods to enforce it.

This newsletter has a thesis. It has not changed.

Institutional corruption at the top creates the conditions for exploitation at the bottom. The two are connected. They have always been connected. And the people who benefit from the institutional version are always the loudest voices condemning the street-level version.

The executive order signed today creates a formal interagency task force, chaired by the Vice President, with 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day accountability milestones to pursue fraud in welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and childcare programs. It names specific states. It names specific immigrant communities. It directs the Attorney General to encourage private citizens to file fraud lawsuits against benefit recipients under the False Claims Act.

The Pentagon's $93.4 billion September spending spree, the worst on record, happened under this administration's Secretary of War, nine months into the DOGE era, and generated no task force, no executive order, no accountability milestones, no press conference, and no mention in today's order.

The federal government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in 2025. Even completely eliminating all non-defense discretionary spending would only reduce that deficit by 40%. The Pentagon alone accounts for more than half of all discretionary spending. Trump told Congress that finding fraud would balance the budget "overnight." The budget will not balance overnight, or any other night, if the largest line item is exempt from scrutiny.

Today the President signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. It names Minnesota. It names Somali immigrants. It names welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, and childcare programs. It demands 30-day reports and 90-day implementation plans. It directs the Attorney General to encourage fraud lawsuits.

It does not name the Pentagon. It does not mention $93.4 billion in September spending. It does not reference king crab, lobster tail, Steinway pianos, Herman Miller chairs, fruit basket stands, or Paw Patrol stickers. It does not create accountability milestones for defense procurement. It does not ask why the Air Force chief of staff needed a $98,329 piano in his living room while the administration was preparing to fight a billion-dollar-a-day war it had not budgeted for.

The war on fraud is real. It is also selective. And selective enforcement is not justice. It is pure theater with a target list.