Ernst Wages War on Waste at the Pentagon
New legislation and transparency on hidden spending will help the Pentagon pass its audit
WASHINGTON – After the Pentagon failed its most recent financial statement, upholding its unenviable title as the only federal agency to never pass an audit, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), is leading the charge in the battle to account for every cent spent by the department.
To end fraud, waste, or abuse in military funding, Ernst is introducing the Reviewing Every Check and Each Invoice Purchasing Troops’ Supplies (RECEIPTS) Act which would require the Pentagon to achieve a clean audit by 2028 and direct them to use AI technology to audit the books, saving money by reducing the reliance on costly consultants.
Ernst is also demanding answers on how many non-disclosed defense dollars were diverted to silly studies from calculating how long seals—the mammals, not Navy SEALs—sleep to snail mucus. Under her COST Act that became law in 2021, all defense spending should have publicly accessible price tags, but the Biden administration failed to comply. Her new letter requests an investigation on noncompliance with the COST Act to ensure taxpayers finally receive the transparency they were promised.
“If we are going to ask taxpayers to spend $1.5 trillion on defense, we must be able to defend how every dollar is being spent,” said Senator Ernst. “We depend on our troops to win wars against foreign enemies, and now, taxpayers are counting on leaders in Washington to win the war on waste. I’m spearheading this fight for tax-dollar transparency by holding the Pentagon accountable to finally passing an audit, investigating shady spending on ridiculous research like octopus hypnosis or monkey mind reading, and demanding that putting public price tags on defense spending is no longer Mission Impossible.”
"White Coat Waste is proud to support Senator Joni Ernst's tireless work to rein in reckless DOD spending at home and abroad, like the Pentagon’s wasteful cat constipation experiments and puppy poisoning tests in China that we worked together to expose and end,” Justin Goodman, Senior Vice President at government watchdog White Coat Waste. “Her common-sense COST Act requires a public price tag on Pentagon-funded projects and our investigators have uncovered animal labs skirting her transparency law and referred them to the Inspector General. Taxpayers have a right to know how their money is being spent — and any animal lab that violates Sen. Ernst’s federal funding disclosure requirements doesn’t deserve another dime.”
Background:
Ernst has spent years fighting to increase transparency on how your taxpayer dollars are spent.
Most notably, her COST Act, which became law in 2021, requires projects financed by many agencies, including the Pentagon, to include a public price tag displaying the cost to taxpayers. She has long worked to expose overbudget government infrastructure projects and her Billion Dollar Boondoggle legislation that passed the Senate in 2025 would require transportation and infrastructure projects that are massively over budget or five years or more behind schedule to be reported to the public every year. Ernst has also pushed to stop secret spending by ending the practice of allowing bureaucrats to avoid the public disclosure of spending by classifying it as an “Other Transactions Agreement.”
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