FY27 NDAA – More Money, Same Failed Audit

Opinion: Defend ourselves and take care of our own people, too

The following was submitted by a member of 50501 Veterans – an Army veteran and retired DoD civilian national security professional with 33 years of federal service. The opinions are her own. They do not reflect the official position of 50501 Veterans.

By Patricia Setari

Congress isn’t quietly “working through” H.R. 8800 anymore. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2027 is the annual must-pass legislation that sets Pentagon policies, troop end-strengths, and military salaries.

It stalled this week, and everyone’s dug in.

Senate Democrats blocked a procedural vote, not over the price tag, but over the administration’s unauthorized war in Iran. Republicans want the defense bill moving. Democrats say Congress can’t rubber-stamp a defense bill while ignoring an undeclared war.

Both things can be true, and right now neither side is blinking.

But the bill isn’t going away, and neither is the price tag attached to it. Whenever it does move, the administration is still asking for $1.15 trillion in the base bill, plus another $350 billion through reconciliation. That’s a $1.5 trillion ask for next year alone: the largest defense budget request in US history, a 44 percent jump in a single year.

It’s ridiculous.

The DoD budget is currently $954 billion a year. To match that, you’d need to add up the next seven biggest military budgets in the world combined: China, Russia, Germany, India, the UK, and Ukraine. That only gets you to about $905 billion. You still need more than half of Saudi Arabia’s entire budget on top of that just to catch up to us.

That’s the scale we’re already talking about. And Congress wants to grow it by nearly half again. Even after adding every other top-15 military budget in the world together, you’re still $165 billion short of what Congress is being asked to hand the Pentagon for next year alone.

I’m not saying gut the military.

I spent 33 years in national security. I know what real deterrence costs, and I know what happens when we get it wrong.

But there’s a difference between funding deterrence and funding waste. A lot of that budget is legacy programs, cost overruns, and contractors protecting turf, not troops protecting Americans.

I’ve seen this up close. I was once forced to outsource a safety of flight program used in every military aircraft to a contractor. When I pushed back and asked about fiscal responsibility, I was told directly that the real goal wasn’t saving money. It was privatization.

That stuck with me. A lot of what gets sold to the public as efficiency is actually just moving taxpayer money into private hands.

Any serious drawdown has to be phased, not slashed overnight.

Target the waste first: audit the cost overruns and renegotiate the contracts that have ballooned past their original estimates. The Pentagon should be required to pass a clean financial audit before it gets another dollar increase.

The DoD has never passed one, not once, and it’s the only Cabinet-level department in Washington that can say that. This isn’t new either. Its books have been flagged as high risk since 1995.

That’s eight years of formal audits, eight failures, and a pledge to keep trying by 2028. All while the budget keeps growing every year in between.

Give the defense industrial base time to convert, not collapse, so we don’t gut jobs in the process. And keep our commitments to allies steady so we’re not inviting the exact instability we’re trying to prevent.

Where should the savings go?

Start with the VA. Veterans often wait months for care they earned. Full funding for VA healthcare and mental health services is a debt we owe, not a favor we’re granting.

Next, Medicaid. Millions of American families, including those with kids or seniors, are one bad diagnosis away from bankruptcy. Restoring and expanding Medicaid funding saves lives immediately, not eventually.

Here’s one that doesn’t always make the priority list, but should: family economic security, meaning affordable childcare and paid family and maternity/paternity leave. This is one of the most effective economic investments this country could make. It gets parents back to work, stabilizes family income, and pays for itself in tax revenue within a decade.

Almost nobody talks about it as a national security issue, but a country where working families can’t afford to raise kids, or take time to bond with a new baby, is not a strong country.

We can defend this nation and take care of our own people. Those aren’t competing goals. They’re the same goal.

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