Washington’s September Spending Spree
A $98,000 Steinway piano for a senior Air Force residence is the kind of government purchase that travels fast online. The number is trivial against the Pentagon’s nearly $900 billion annual budget. But that’s not why it spread.
Stories like this tap into a widespread belief that Washington spends public money with far less discipline than American families and businesses must apply to their own finances. That perception has fueled a growing appetite to root out waste — propelling ideas like the “Department of Government Efficiency” into the national conversation across party lines.
But the Steinway piano is really a symptom of something more structural.
The problem is the calendar.
Every September, as the federal fiscal year approaches its end, government spending surges. Agencies rush to obligate funds Congress appropriated for that year, because unspent money can expire — and leaving money on the table can mean a smaller budget next time around.
Budget insiders call it “use it or lose it.”
This year, the scale of the surge drew unusual attention. Federal procurement data showed the Department of Defense obligated $93.4 billion in September 2025, the highest monthly total ever recorded for any federal agency. More than $50 billion was committed in the final five working days of the fiscal year alone.
The scale may be an outlier, but the pattern isn’t new, and it isn’t partisan. Researchers have documented year-end spending spikes for decades. Agency managers face real pressure to obligate every dollar before the clock runs out on September 30.
The result is a predictable surge driven not by strategic planning, but by a deadline.
When billions must move in the final days of the fiscal year, contracting offices get overwhelmed, timelines compress, and vendors know agencies are trying to close out their books. The system quietly rewards speed of spending over quality of spending decisions.
None of this necessarily means corruption, or even waste. Many September contracts fund legitimate operational needs: equipment purchases, technology upgrades, services that support agency missions. But the optics matter.
A $98,000 piano is a rounding error in the defense budget. What it isn’t is invisible. Purchases like that become symbols of a government that appears to spend first and scrutinize later, and those symbols feed a broader crisis of confidence in how public money is managed.
The stakes are real. The Government Accountability Office estimates that fraud across federal programs costs up to $521 billion annually. Improper payments — fraud, overpayments, administrative errors — totaled $236 billion in fiscal year 2023 alone. Those figures dwarf any individual questionable purchase.
But public trust is built by stories. And when taxpayers keep encountering stories about odd or unnecessary government purchases, they reinforce the belief that the system itself is broken.
It doesn’t have to be.
Fixing the calendar problem doesn’t require tearing the system down.
Three targeted reforms could significantly reduce the pressure behind year-end spending surges.
One, Congress could allow agencies limited carryover authority — letting them roll a portion of unused funds into the following fiscal year, rather than racing to spend every dollar by September 30.
Two, certain categories of spending, particularly technology, could move to multi-year timelines that better reflect how long-term projects actually work. Software development, modernization projects, and IT infrastructure rarely fit neatly into a twelve-month funding window, and forcing them to do so produces exactly the kind of fragmented, rushed procurement that drives up costs and under-delivers on outcomes. Multi-year authority would let agencies build relationships with vendors, hold them accountable across the full arc of a project, and make smarter tradeoffs — instead of starting from scratch each October.
Three, Congress could also require agencies to flag and justify any contracts obligated in the final ten working days of the fiscal year, creating a paper trail that invites scrutiny rather than just producing data that sits in a database.
None of these changes would eliminate September spending. Annual appropriations remain central to congressional control over public funds. But they could begin to realign the system’s incentives with what taxpayers reasonably expect: careful planning, disciplined decisions, and spending driven by mission needs, not the calendar.
The $98,000 piano will fade from the headlines. The incentive structure that produced it will persist, unless something changes.
Photo by D Z on Unsplash. Article first posted on GovIntegrity.