A letter to the editor, from the desk of Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, lately of the river, now of the supply closet
To the Editor:
Sir —
I have met a good many frugal men in my time, and I have observed that the true test of frugality is not what a man does when he has money, but what he does on the last day of the month when he finds he has some left over. The prudent man puts it by. The Pentagon, I am informed, buys a piano.
The matter has come to my attention by way of a watchdog outfit called Open The Books, which has examined the Department of Defense’s accounts for September of last year and found, in the wording of Fox’s Los Angeles station, a spending spree of $93.4 billion in a single month. That is, by the watchdog’s reckoning, the highest September on record, at least back to 2008, as the fiscal year drew to its close and the department made haste to spend what remained before it should be taken from it. The practice has a name, which is “use it or lose it,” and I confess I have never heard four words that so fully describe a government.
Now I wish to be fair about this, for there is a way of telling the story that is not quite fair, and a humorist who lies in the service of a good cause is only a politician with better timing. The ninety-three billion dollars was not spent on lobster. It is the sum of every contract and grant obligated that month, most of it, I should suppose, upon ordinary and serious matters like ships, aircraft, and the people who build them. The practice itself is old, and the gentleman now in charge did not invent it. I will thank no one to say that Secretary Hegseth personally ordered the crab, because I have seen nothing to show it, and a man ought not to be held to account for a lobster he cannot be proved to have eaten.
But I am also a student of proportion, and the proportion is where the meat of the thing lies, if you will forgive the expression.
Within that one month, the account books show, the Pentagon obligated some six million nine hundred thousand dollars for lobster tails. It spent over fifteen million on ribeye steaks. It spent two million on Alaskan king crab, a creature I had always understood to be a luxury of the sort a man buys only when a bonus has been declared. It spent nearly a hundred and forty thousand on doughnuts and a hundred and twenty-four thousand on machines for making ice cream. It purchased a Steinway grand piano, at ninety-eight thousand dollars and some change, for the residence of an Air Force officer. It bought two hundred and twenty-five million dollars in furniture, of which a single chair, I am told, fetched nearly nineteen hundred dollars, and it laid out upward of twelve thousand dollars for stands on which to display fruit.
I do not say that a soldier fights better for having eaten crab. I have never heard a soldier say it. I have heard soldiers say a great many things, most of them unsuitable for the Sunday edition, and none concerned the king crab. But I will allow that a case might be made, and I invite anyone who thinks so to make it in the presence of the men who eat from the mess hall.
What strikes me, sir, is the coincidence of the dates. The gentleman at the head of the Department, in February of 2025, announced with great cheerfulness that he welcomed an examination of the books by the Department of Government Efficiency, since he thought it right that the public know where the dollars were going. It is a sentiment I admire. I only observe that a year later the public has learned where some of them went, and that the place was a wine-dark sea of crustaceans, with a piano floating in it.
The Governor of California has marked the occasion with a picture, painted by a machine, of the Secretary lounging amid the steaks and shellfish. A Congresswoman from New Mexico has promised, in a phrase I cannot improve upon, that she will be investigating. Both are doubtless sincere, and one has never known either office to refrain from a sincere gesture when an election was in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the nation, as the Fox station took care to remind its viewers, has entered a costly war in Iran, in which the first two days alone are estimated to have consumed over five billion dollars in munitions. The munitions, at least, were intended for the purpose.
I make no accusation. I propose only a reform, which I offer free of charge to Congress, that on the thirtieth of September of each year the Department be required to return whatever it has not used, in cash, to the Treasury, and that the Treasury issue a receipt. I believe the lobster industry would survive the shock. I am less sure about the piano.
I remain, sir, as ever,
Mark Twain
(deceased, and, to the best of my knowledge, not yet in arrears to the Treasury)