Leaders of a congressional subcommittee wrote to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Monday asking for an update on the Pentagon’s progress toward passing a financial audit.
The Department of Defense has failed to account for its spending for years properly. It failed seven consecutive audits and isn’t expected to do any better next year.
Subcommittee on Government Operations Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, and Ranking Member Kweisi Mfume, D-Maryland, asked Hegseth for a bipartisan briefing on the DOD’s progress toward passing an audit by the end of the month.
“DOD spending comprises nearly half of the federal government’s discretionary spending and its physical assets make up more than 70% of the government’s physical assets,” they wrote in the letter. “The failure to fully account for these assets and spending results in gaps in DOD’s operational readiness and the financial strength of the entire federal government.”
The Pentagon is the only agency subject to the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 “that has never obtained an unmodified or ‘clean’ audit opinion on its financial statements, primarily due to serious financial management and system weaknesses,” Asif Khan, a director of financial management assurance at the Government Accountability Office, told the subcommittee in April.
Sessions and Mfume said they want an update to make sure the Pentagon’s progress is on track to meet the 2028 deadline.
“As stated in previous hearings, if DOD is to achieve a clean audit opinion by December 2028, significant progress must be made by fiscal year 2026,” they wrote. “Based on testimony before the Subcommittee, there is still a lot of work ahead for the Department.”
They asked for a briefing on DOD’s efforts by the end of June.
President Donald Trump previously proposed $1.01 trillion budget for the Pentagon in fiscal year 2026, a 13% increase over the previous year.
Each year, teams of independent public accountants audit the department’s $4.1 trillion in assets and $4.3 trillion in liabilities.
In January, the GAO, Congress’s research arm, said that the federal government must address “serious deficiencies” in federal financial management and correct course on its “unsustainable” long-term fiscal path. U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, head of the GAO, said many of the challenges result from financial management problems within the U.S. Department of Defense.
The report noted three major problem areas: “serious financial management problems” at the Department of Defense; the federal government’s inability to adequately account for intragovernmental activity and balances between federal entities, and “weaknesses in the federal government’s process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.”
Congress has run a deficit every year since 2001. In the past 50 years, the federal government has ended with a fiscal year-end budget surplus four times, most recently in 2001.
