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Trump restores ‘Department of War’ as Defense Dept. secondary title
President Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth to use “Department of War” as a secondary name for the Pentagon.
PENTAGON – The U.S. Marine Corps passed its third annual audit in a row, a benchmark of financial accountability and fraud prevention that no other military service, or the Pentagon as a whole, has ever passed.
Independent auditors who reviewed the Marine Corps’ budget bookkeeping for last fiscal year gave it a passing grade for the third year in a row, the Marines announced on Feb. 9.
“It’s a big, happy day for the Marine Corps,” Lt. Gen. James Adams III, the Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for programs and resources, told reporters. Over the course of a year, Adams said, an independent company had “reviewed all our records and that our financial records are all materially accurate, complete and in compliance with federal regulations.”
No other military service has ever passed an audit, let alone the Pentagon as a whole – a point of criticism for decades for the government agency that receives more American taxpayer dollars than any other. The Pentagon announced in December that it had failed for the eighth consecutive time since the first audit of its finances was conducted in 2018.
President Donald Trump has proposed raising the military’s budget to $1.5 trillion – a 50% increase.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has committed to landing a clean Pentagon audit by 2028. “The American taxpayers deserve that,” he said in February of last year.
But the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a federal watchdog agency, assessed in April that the Pentagon had assessed that such an outcome was unlikely. The department still needs to address “pervasive weaknesses in its finances” and “accelerate the pace at which it addresses these long-standing issues,” according to its report. The Pentagon initially disagreed with more than half of GAO’s 17 recommendations to improve across three reports, and 13 of those remained unresolved as of May 2025.
Oversight officials have emphasized that a failed audit does not amount to proof of fraud, waste or abuse in the Pentagon budget, but rather weaknesses and inconsistencies in its internal accounting systems. The Defense Department’s trillion-dollar budget is dispersed throughout smaller agencies and funding streams that use incompatible and often antiquated computer systems to keep track of money.
But it definitely makes fraud harder to track down. Between 2017 and 2024, the Pentagon reported around $10.8 billion in “confirmed fraud,” according to the Government Accountability Office report. The full extent of fraud “is not known but is potentially significant.”
Adams said no instances of fraud or price gouging were uncovered over the course of the audit. He said, “I’m glad to say that we haven’t seen any, but I do feel much more comfortable and confident that it would be less likely for that to actually happen.”
Over the years, the military has been plagued by wasteful spending and fraudulent contracts – some absurd, like paying nearly $150,000 extra for a plastic soap dispenser, and others staggering, like mega-defense contractor Raytheon’s $950 million payment in 2024 to resolve a Justice Department investigation into schemes it ran to defraud the Pentagon through “defective pricing.”