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Right on cue, the left found their latest angle of attack against Pete Hegseth and the Department of War: steak and lobster. A report from Open the Books revealed that the Pentagon’s year-end spending spree in September 2025 included roughly $22 million in food purchases — Alaskan king crab, ribeye steaks, lobster, salmon. And the liberal outrage machine cranked up to full volume, acting like Hegseth personally ordered surf and turf on your dime.
🔥🚨BREAKING: Pete Hegseth’s Department of War is facing backlash from liberals after reportedly buying $22 mil worth of steak and lobster near the end of the spending year.
Liberals are attempting to criticize the DOW but are disregarding the fact that our government pays for… pic.twitter.com/2pzUAkyARG
— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) March 11, 2026
But as Dom Lucre pointed out, the selective outrage tells you everything. These same people who are suddenly fiscal hawks over military food budgets had nothing to say about the billions — with a B — that flowed out of Washington for years under the previous administration with zero accountability. Gender studies programs in Pakistan. Billions in equipment abandoned in Afghanistan. A national debt that blew past $36 trillion while the Biden administration printed money like it was going out of style. But sure, let’s get upset about crab legs for troops.
Here’s what the left doesn’t want you to understand: the “use it or lose it” budgeting system that caused this September spending spike has been in place for decades. Every federal agency does it. When you know your budget gets slashed next year if you don’t spend every penny this year, you spend every penny this year. That’s not a Hegseth problem. That’s not a Trump problem. That’s a structural Washington problem that every administration since Reagan has failed to fix. And it’s exactly the kind of broken incentive that DOGE was created to address.
The Pentagon spent $93.4 billion in September alone — $50.1 billion of that in the final five business days. Yes, that’s insane. Yes, it needs to change. But the people screaming loudest about it aren’t angry about the waste. They’re angry about who’s in charge now. When Obama’s Pentagon was doing the same thing — and they were — you didn’t hear a peep from CNN. When Biden’s DOD failed its audit for the seventh consecutive year, the media shrugged. But now that Hegseth is actually trying to reform the institution, suddenly every ribeye receipt is a scandal.
This is what they do. They can’t attack the policy — because ending wasteful spending is popular across the board. So they attack the optics. They cherry-pick the most headline-friendly line items and pretend that $22 million in food for a department with 3.4 million employees is somehow outrageous. Run the math: that’s about $6.50 per person. You can’t even get a combo meal for that. But context doesn’t generate clicks, and nuance doesn’t fuel the outrage cycle.
The real question isn’t why the Pentagon bought steak and lobster. The real question is why the federal government has been allowed to operate a budgeting system that incentivizes blowing through billions in the final days of every fiscal year with zero consequence. That’s the reform Hegseth and DOGE are working toward. And the fact that the left is trying to turn food purchases into a gotcha moment tells you they’ve got nothing real to throw at this administration.
Our troops deserve good food. Our taxpayers deserve accountability. And the Washington establishment deserves to have its broken incentive structures ripped out by the roots. Hegseth isn’t the problem here — he inherited a system designed to waste your money, and he’s one of the first defense leaders in a generation who actually seems interested in fixing it.
Are you buying the left’s steak and lobster hysteria, or do you see through the selective outrage? Let us know below.
Providence watches over the bold.
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