🦞🥩 In just ONE MONTH, Pete Hegeth Spent $22 million of taxpayer money on ribeyes and lobster tails. Yes, I'm dead serious.

They do this while cutting cancer research and food stamps for poor people. It's despicable. They are despicable.

The Trump administration keeps telling us there’s “no money.”

No money for cancer research.
No money to keep poor families fed.
No money to protect people from losing their SNAP benefits.
No money for basic dignity.

But somehow—somehow—there’s always money for the people with power to live like kings.

And I need you to understand what your tax dollars were used for, because this isn’t a small scandal. It’s a window into a system that has stopped pretending it serves the public.

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Now here’s the outrage.

In the final month of the 2025 fiscal year—September—the Pentagon went on a spending spree so grotesque it reads like satire. They spent $93 billion in that month alone, rushing to drain the budget before it expired. That’s the “use it or lose it” game federal agencies play: if you don’t spend it all, you risk getting less next year.

But what the Pentagon spent it on is what should make your stomach turn.

Because this is your money. Taxpayer money. The money of teachers and nurses and truck drivers and warehouse workers and single parents and retirees. The money people paid while groceries got more expensive and rent got impossible and medical bills kept stacking up.

And they treated it like a luxury catalog.

A buffet.

A private club.

• a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano

• $5.3 million on Apple devices (including new iPads)

• $2 million on Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million on lobster tail ($7.4 million total on lobster tail across March, May, June, September, and October)

• $15.1 million on ribeye steak in September alone

• $124,000 on ice cream machines and $139,224 on 272 doughnut orders

• $225 million on furniture, including $12,000 for fruit basket stands and more than $60,000 on Herman Miller recliners

I’m not making any of that up. Those aren’t metaphors. Those are line items.

And here’s what makes it even more obscene: this didn’t happen in some fantasy world where nobody is suffering.

It happened while families in the United States are one emergency away from homelessness. It happened while people ration medication. It happened while the richest country on earth has kids going to school hungry. It happened while politicians and bureaucrats keep telling the public to “tighten belts.”

They spent $6.9 million on lobster tails in a single month!!!!

And then they look you in the face and say, “We need to cut spending.”

No. They need to cut theft.

Because that’s what this is: legalized theft. A system designed so that every year, agencies are incentivized to waste money at the end of the fiscal year, just to protect their future budgets. It’s bureaucratic self-preservation masquerading as “normal operations.”

And it is despicable.

They can always find the money—when it serves them

Here’s the pattern I want you to see.

When the spending benefits ordinary people—health care, food, housing, education—suddenly it’s “too expensive.” Suddenly we’re told we have to be “responsible.” Suddenly we’re lectured about deficits.

But when it’s time for luxury spending inside the largest military apparatus on earth, the checks get signed like it’s Monopoly money.

And before somebody tries to defend this by saying, “That’s a tiny fraction of the budget,” I need you to understand: that excuse is part of how corruption survives. Corruption always hides behind scale.

“It’s only a little.”
“It’s not that much.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s standard.”

No.

If you are paying your taxes and you can’t afford groceries, it is not “standard” that your money is used to buy steak dinners, lobster tails, and expensive furniture for people who already have everything.

It’s a moral insult.

The “use it or lose it” excuse is a confession

“Use it or lose it” is not a justification. It’s a confession that the system is designed to reward waste.

If the Pentagon genuinely needed $93 billion in September, they wouldn’t be spending it on fruit basket stands and luxury pianos. They would be showing receipts for urgent readiness and troop safety and real national security needs.

Instead, the receipts tell a different story: this is a machine that spends because it can, because it must, because nobody stops it—and because the political class is terrified of confronting it.

And while this is happening, millions of people are being squeezed.

People lose food assistance.
People lose health coverage.
People lose stability.

And the same leaders who shrug at that suffering will turn around and call it “fiscal responsibility.”

It’s not responsibility. It’s cruelty plus corruption.

That’s the story. And it should be a national scandal.

Because we are living in a country where people are told to accept hunger and disease and deprivation as “normal,” while the people controlling the largest pot of money in the federal government spend like they’re staging a banquet.

This is not just waste.

It’s a declaration: they think they’re above you.

And if we don’t confront that—if we treat it like gossip or partisan entertainment—it will keep happening, year after year, while the rest of the country is told to go without.

If you value reporting that refuses to normalize this kind of corruption, please click here to become a member. And if you want to choose your level of support, click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.

Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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