Good morning, fellow taxpayers: This is a public service report for...

Editor's note: ...every American taxpayer who has ever wondered where their money (it's actually not your money) actually goes. Lockheed Martin (the epitome of the deep state), the largest defense contractor in the US, which is not America, received billions of dollars in new federal contracts in July 2026 alone, part of a defense budget that crossed $1 trillion dollars (if you stacked $1 trillion in $100 bills into a cube, it would only be about the size of a seven-story building, practically pocket change) for the first time even as the Pentagon failed its financial audit for an eighth consecutive year. Few of the American people funding this system, through payroll taxes withheld from every paycheck, ever see how the money moves: which offices approve it, why the contracts keep growing even when programs run late and over budget, and why the benefits rarely reach anyone outside the company's shareholders, executives, and workforce. This report lays out that process in plain terms, using the government's own contract announcements, its own watchdog's findings, and its own disclosure records, so taxpayers can judge for themselves whether "the system serves the public that pays for it." Don't expect any US senate or congressional member to seriously reflect on this public service report.
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The Money Machine: How Lockheed Martin Draws Billions From the Federal Treasury, and Why Ordinary Taxpayers Rarely See It

July 30, 2026 | AD News Network 

A System Built on Public Money, Not Private Capital

Every dollar Lockheed Martin receives through a Department of War contract begins as money appropriated by Congress and drawn from the U.S. Treasury. The company does not access a line of credit or borrow against future earnings to build F-35 fighters or THAAD interceptors. It receives obligated federal funds, authorized first through the National Defense Authorization Act and then through annual appropriations bills, and disbursed contract by contract as work is performed.

The scale of that flow is difficult to overstate. In just the final three weeks of July 2026, Department of War records show Lockheed Martin receiving individual awards ranging from under $20 million for Stinger missile production up to a $1.6 billion order for F-35 spare parts, on top of a 12-year, up to $10.5 billion logistics support agreement with U.S. Special Operations Command announced in early July 2026. None of this required new legislation. It flowed through pre-existing basic ordering agreements and indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract vehicles that Congress and the Pentagon set up years earlier. Lockheed Martin must be thrilled the US War Department is now "out of missiles" with the "IRGC more terrified of the US Treasury than the missiles."

Who Actually Signs Off

The chain of approval runs through several layers, and no single office simply writes Lockheed a check.

Congress sets the ceiling. Lawmakers pass the NDAA, which authorizes policy and spending levels, and separate appropriations bills, which actually release the money. For fiscal year 2026, the Pentagon's budget crossed the trillion-dollar mark for the first time, a figure Congress approved by wide margins in both chambers.

Contracting officers, warranted individuals inside each military service's acquisition command, are the people who legally obligate the government to a specific contract. For the awards described in the Department of War's daily contract notices, these are typically officers at Naval Air Systems Command, Army Contracting Command, or similar service commands.

The Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) administers the contract once it's signed. Its work spans the full lifecycle, from evaluating a contractor's readiness before award to monitoring cost and schedule performance, verifying quality at the contractor's own facilities, and overseeing government property held by the contractor.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) is the actual financial auditor. It examines whether the costs Lockheed bills the government are reasonable, allowable, and properly allocated, and audits the contractor's internal accounting systems for compliance with federal cost accounting standards.

The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) handles the mechanics of payment. It processes disbursements to contractors, maintains the department's general ledger, and produces the financial statements meant to give Congress and the public a picture of where the money went.

In theory, this is a system of checks. In practice, each layer has documented weaknesses that critics argue amount to a rubber stamp dressed up as oversight.

The Audit Problem

The most striking fact in this entire arrangement is rarely mentioned alongside individual contract announcements: the Department of War has never passed a full financial audit. In its most recent annual report, the department failed for an eighth consecutive year, and auditors identified 26 material weaknesses in its internal financial controls, including its ability to track spending on programs like the F-35. This failure occurred in the same fiscal year Congress approved a record military budget exceeding a trillion dollars.

That combination, a client that cannot account for its own books receiving an ever-larger allowance, is at the center of what critics describe as a system with weak accountability. It is not that no one checks the spending; DCAA audits exist, DCMA oversight exists, and the Government Accountability Office regularly investigates specific programs. But the department's own consolidated financial statements, the ones meant to tell the public whether the money was tracked correctly, remain unauditable.

The F-35 as Case Study

No program illustrates the dynamic better than the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Lockheed's flagship product and the most expensive weapons program in history. Acquisition costs have grown from an original 2001 projection of $233 billion to roughly $485 billion today, with lifetime sustainment now projected at $1.58 trillion, bringing the total lifecycle cost above $2 trillion over the aircraft's expected 77-year service life.

Government Accountability Office (GOA) reviews have repeatedly found that the program continues to overpromise and underdeliver. In 2024, Lockheed delivered F-35 aircraft an average of 238 days late, up sharply from 61 days late the year before, and every single one of the 110 aircraft delivered that year arrived behind schedule. The GAO also found that incentive fees intended to punish late delivery were structured loosely enough that Lockheed could deliver aircraft up to 60 days late and still collect part of the bonus (see F-35 is the biggest sinkhole ever). Separately, a June 2026 GAO report found the fleet's mission-capable rate, the share of time aircraft can perform their assigned tasks, had declined from 67 percent to 44 percent between fiscal years 2021 and 2025, with the fully mission-capable rate falling to just 25 percent.

In July 2026, the Pentagon took the unusual step of blocking public release of the GAO's long-running annual F-35 assessment, the first time in more than two decades that report had been withheld. That decision removed one of the few independent, recurring sources of public information on the program's cost and performance, at the same moment Lockheed continued receiving new production and sustainment orders under the same contract vehicles.

None of this has interrupted the flow of funding. The aircraft remains, in the Pentagon's own framing (the Pentagon is not America), central to US and allied airpower, and Congress has continued to authorize its production even as cost growth and delivery failures accumulate year after year.

Why It Looks Like Unlimited Credit

Several structural features make the flow of money to Lockheed look less like ordinary purchasing and more like an open tap.

IDIQ ceilings are not cash outlays. When a contract is announced with a $10.5 billion or $35 billion figure attached, that number is usually a ceiling on what could be spent over many years, not money paid on the spot. Actual dollars move only when individual task orders are issued beneath that ceiling, but headlines and even government press releases often present the ceiling figure as though it were a lump sum, exaggerating the immediate scale of any single transaction while making the long-term commitment easy to overlook.

Limited competition keeps leverage on Lockheed's side. A recurring phrase in the Department of War's own daily contract announcements is that an action "was not competed," or that only one bid was solicited and one received. Once the government commits to a platform like the F-35, for which Lockheed is the sole manufacturer, it has little practical alternative but to keep paying for parts, upgrades, and sustainment from that same company for decades.

Cost-plus and incentive-fee structures shift risk toward the government. Many of the contracts described in Pentagon notices are cost-plus-fixed-fee orders, meaning Lockheed is reimbursed for allowable costs plus a fee, rather than a fixed price agreed in advance. When costs grow, as they have repeatedly on the F-35's Block 4 modernization effort (which has grown more than 50 percent above its original baseline, from $10.6 billion to $16.5 billion, according to the GAO), the government absorbs much of that overrun.

The Political Infrastructure Behind the Contracts

Lockheed does not simply wait for contracts to be offered. It spent nearly $15.7 million on federal lobbying in 2025 alone, deploying both outside firms and an in-house team that, according to trade press coverage, included over a dozen lobbyists working simultaneously on the fiscal year 2026 defense authorization and appropriations bills.

Much of that lobbying workforce has passed through the same institutions it now petitions. Reporting compiled around a 2023 shareholder filing found that 73 percent of Lockheed's registered lobbyists that year had previously worked in government regulatory roles (it's all about the flow of money) before moving into lobbying or private-sector positions, in some cases overseeing the very programs they had once regulated. A broader 2023 Senate report identified more than 672 former officials, military officers, and members of Congress who had passed through the revolving door into roles with the top twenty defense contractors. In 2026, the Pentagon itself proposed loosening the post-employment "cooling off" restrictions that currently slow that revolving door, submitting the change for consideration in the next defense authorization act.

This is legal, disclosed, and routine. It is also a structural advantage that ordinary taxpayers, who fund the programs being lobbied for, have no equivalent access to.

Where the Benefit Actually Lands

The core distributional question is straightforward: who gains when Lockheed wins a contract, and who does not.

The mechanism is best described as risk socialization paired with profit privatization. When Lockheed's costs overrun on a program like the F-35, the government absorbs much of that overrun directly through cost-plus contract structures, incentive fees that pay out even on late delivery, and appropriations that simply grow to match the shortfall, all funded by taxpayers who have no vote on the specific contract terms. When the program performs well, or even adequately, the financial upside flows in the opposite direction: to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks, to executives through compensation tied to revenue and earnings, and to a workforce concentrated in a relatively small number of congressional districts.

The public underwrites the downside as a matter of routine appropriations, since a program judged too big to fail rarely sees its funding cut even after documented delays, cost growth, or declining readiness rates, while the upside accrues to a private entity whose ownership and profit distribution the public has no claim on. The taxpayer's role in this arrangement is structurally limited to that of an involuntary creditor: they fund the losses when they occur, but hold no equity in the gains.

Direct beneficiaries include Lockheed's roughly 122,000 employees across states like Texas, Florida, New York, and Maryland, whose wages depend on continued production; the company's shareholders, who benefit from steady, government-guaranteed revenue; and the communities built around major production sites like Fort Worth and Orlando, where local economies are tied to the plant's payroll and subcontracts. Does anyone actually think any of these 122,000 Lockheed employees care about how many Ukrainians are killed?

Indirect beneficiaries include allied nations that purchase F-35s and other systems through foreign military sales, and the U.S. armed forces, which receive the hardware, whatever its cost or delay record.

The general taxpaying public, by contrast, experiences this spending primarily as an opportunity cost. Money appropriated for defense contracts is money not available for other federal priorities, and the average taxpayer has no direct financial stake in whether Lockheed's stock rises or its F-35 deliveries improve. Their connection to the transaction is entirely indirect: they fund it through taxes and federal borrowing, and their only levers of control are the ballot box and, at a further remove, whichever members of Congress and Pentagon officials they help elect or whose appointments they can pressure through political engagement. There is no mechanism by which an individual taxpayer can object to, audit, or redirect a specific contract award. That authority rests with contracting officers, service acquisition executives, and the members of the House and Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees who negotiate the NDAA and defense spending bills each year, many of whom receive campaign contributions from the same companies whose budgets they set.

The Case Defenders Make

It would be incomplete to describe this system only through its critics' eyes. Lockheed and its supporters in government make a different argument, and it deserves fair treatment.

They point out that the F-35 is combat-proven (dropping stand off weapons off F35 pylons at targets in Gaza) and, in their assessment, the most capable multirole fighter available to the US and its allies, a claim reinforced by its operational record with partners like Israel. They argue that maintaining a domestic industrial base capable of building fifth-generation aircraft, submarine-launched missiles, and missile-defense interceptors is itself a national security asset that cannot be recreated quickly if allowed to atrophy, and that sole-source contracting is often less a failure of competition than a consequence of the enormous fixed costs and specialized expertise required to build these systems at all. They also note that defense spending supports hundreds of thousands of jobs spread across nearly every state, generating local tax revenue and economic activity well beyond Lockheed's own payroll.

Whether these benefits justify the costs and oversight failures documented above is a matter of ongoing political and public debate, one playing out in Congress, in GAO reports, and in the reporting cited throughout this piece, rather than a question with a single settled answer.

The Bottom Line

The system that channels tens of billions of dollars a year to Lockheed Martin is not literally an unlimited line of credit. It is a structured, legally authorized process running through Congress, contracting officers, DCMA, DCAA, and DFAS. But that structure has, by its own regulators' admission, never produced a clean financial audit of the department funding it, has repeatedly failed to enforce cost and schedule discipline on its largest program, and operates alongside a lobbying and revolving-door apparatus that gives the contractor influence over the very officials (the congress and senate) meant to hold it accountable. For the taxpayer footing the bill, the practical experience is one of distance: the money leaves their paycheck, moves through a budget process they can only influence at election time, if you actually believe voting changes anything, and returns to them, if at all, only indirectly, unless they happen to draw a Lockheed Martin paycheck themselves.

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Editor's note: Since entering service in 2006, the F-35 has been involved in roughly 15 to 17 total losses, including one fatal crash of a Japanese Air Self-Defense Force pilot in 2019, while the broader fleet has repeatedly struggled with parts shortages, engine problems, and mission-capable rates that fell to just 25 percent by 2025, all within a program now projected to cost more than $2 trillion over its lifetime. We're terribly sorry to inform the American taxpayer another F-35 goes down...