Lobster, Crab, and a $21,000 Flute

It gets tougher and tougher to watch the wanton spending coming out of Washington and not feel like there’s something fundamentally broken going on in the US.

Latest case in point: Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense, went street-rat crazy last September, allowing the Department of Defense to embark on a spending binge truly worthy of a drunken sailor.

Per Open the Books, a nonpartisan, non-profit watchdog group sniffing out stupidity, asininity, and ridiculous waste in federal spending:

Defense officials typically enter the end of each fiscal year with at least one goal in mind: spend the rest of the military’s budget by any means necessary. Otherwise, “use-it-or-lose-it” funding rules force the Pentagon to forfeit its unused money and potentially see reduced funding next year.

Open the Books has tracked the annual September spending bonanza for nearly a decade. Military spending has spiked every year, regardless of which party controlled the White House.

However, there has never been anything quite like September 2025, when $93.4 billion was spent on grants and contracts. Since at least 2008 — and presumably in history — no federal agency has ever spent so much on grants and contracts in a single month.

In the last five working days of September alone, the DoD spent $50.1 billion on grants and contracts.

Now, you might be thinking, “OK, El Jefe… you’re right—$93.4 billion in a single month does seem egregious. But America needs bombs and jets and paperclips for the Defense Department.”

If those were, in fact, the expenses, then I’d be writing to you today about gold or oil or the ongoing tug-of-war regarding the Federal Reserve’s leadership.

Alas, dear reader, much of Hegseth’s spree had zero to do with national defense.

Let’s go to the scorecard:

• $2 million on Alaskan king crab.
• $6.9 million on lobster tails (least they could’ve done was buy crawfish instead; it’s far tastier than bland lobster—no arguing that point will be brooked).
• $15.1 million on ribeye steaks.
• $1 million on salmon.
• $124,000 on ice-cream machines.
• $98,329 for a Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home.
• $26,000 for a violin.
• $21,750 for a custom handmade flute from the luxury Japanese brand Muramatsu. (Apparently, the US military is going to tame the Iranian beast by singing a lullaby, I guess.)
• $3,160 on stickers featuring Dora the Explorer, Frozen, and Paw Patrol (I wanted to make the joke that these are for Pete Hegseth’s birthday party, but then late-night comedian Stephen Colbert beat me to the punch…)

I tell you all of this because these kinds of asinine expenses are the reason America’s fiscal situation looks so bleak. It’s a prime example of the waste that, over decades and multiple administrations on both sides of the aisle, has culminated in a debt pile rapidly approaching $40 trillion… and why the US is now spending a trillion dollars or more every year just to cover interest payments on the debt, costlier than any other budgetary line item except Social Security and Medicare.

Underprivileged school children in America can’t have a free breakfast, but Pete Hegseth can spend a combined $25 million on surf and turf just because the Department of Defense risks losing funding in the next budget cycle because it didn’t spend everything in this budget cycle.

Sure—totally makes sense.

Here’s a thought, though: If the department didn’t spend it, then maybe the department didn’t need it?

Just maybe it was governmental excess to begin with—because lord knows the DoD desperately needs three grand worth of Dora the Explorer stickers and a $21,000 flute to keep America safe.

This is why I say America needs serious reform. The government over the last few decades has morphed into a beast that exists only to perpetuate its existence by way of funding from billionaires who then demand obsequiousness from D.C.

The people… we’re just a useful nuisance.

We’re the hoi polloi needed to pay taxes and to performatively vote and to hate each other on command because of some ignorant culture war that some idiot in government gins up to rile one side against the other so that government can then get on with the real business of openly screwing the hoi polloi who aren’t paying attention.

The whole system needs a rethink.

It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, just like those original European emigrants did when they fled the Old World and built a new society and a new form of government in the New World.

Alas, the new government is now stiff and unyielding, and needs replacing.

That day is coming. Sooner, I suspect, than most folks might imagine.

Which is why all of this fits into the mosaic that has me regularly recommending that you own gold, Swiss francs, and bitcoin. They are the assets that will survive the transformative fires to come.

The American government—every iteration of it over the last quarter century—has moved the nation farther and farther away from the principles that founded the country. There is no Uno reverse card to play, however. So, we’re on this fixed path until the end.

Just know, though, that the America we all know as normal today is not the America that’s going to re-emerge next decade. The New America is going to be a helluva fine place… It’s just that the road from here to there goes through a dark and dangerous forest ahead.

Lucky for us, Pete Hegseth has a flute to guide us, and some Dora the Explorer stickers to hand out on the other side.