The Pentagon has a dirty little secret about your tax dollars.
Bureaucrats thought they could bury it forever.
But Joni Ernst just caught the Pentagon Deep Staters hiding the cost of this insane experiment.
Pentagon caught spending defense dollars on octopus hypnosis while breaking federal law
Iowa Senator Joni Ernst just exposed Pentagon bureaucrats for illegally hiding how much they spent hypnotizing octopuses with your tax dollars.
You read that right — octopus hypnosis.
Ernst fired off a letter to newly-confirmed Department of War Inspector General Platte Moring demanding answers about studies the Biden Pentagon funded on "octopus hypnosis," "snail mucus," and "monkey mind-reading."
Here's the scandal: Nobody knows what any of this cost because the Pentagon broke federal law by refusing to disclose the price tags.
Ernst sponsored the Cost Openness and Spending Transparency Act back in 2021, which became law as part of that year's National Defense Authorization Act.
The law requires every single federally-funded study to post its cost to taxpayers.
The Pentagon ignored it.
"Posting a public price tag provides greater accountability for ensuring tax dollars are being spent strengthening our nation's defenses and not being wasted on projects that are defenseless," Ernst wrote in her letter.
The Pentagon gets handed more than $140 billion every year for research and development.
That money is supposed to modernize America's defenses and give our troops the best weapons to defeat enemies and protect the nation.
Instead, bureaucrats at the Department of War diverted those dollars to figure out if octopuses can be hypnotized as a replacement for anesthesia.
They also funded studies examining how long elephant seals sleep, analyzing the properties of snail mucus, tracking "doomscrolling" habits on Facebook, and attempting to decode monkey brain signals.
None of those studies listed their costs anywhere in public documents.
"Reviews by my office have found award recipients often acknowledge receiving R&D funds for general purposes in press releases, but also largely omit the dollar amount in public documents related to specific projects paid for with the funds from the Pentagon, such as individual published studies or press releases sharing the findings of the studies," Ernst explained.
This violates federal law.
Ernst calls out the Pentagon for breaking transparency requirements
The Pentagon's financial management is a complete disaster.
The Department of War just failed its eighth consecutive audit — meaning for eight straight years, independent auditors couldn't verify how the Pentagon spent its massive budget.
The Pentagon is the only major federal agency that has never passed a financial audit since Congress mandated them in 2018.
Auditors identified 26 material weaknesses and two significant deficiencies in the Pentagon's financial reporting for fiscal year 2025.
The department couldn't even verify key assets in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program, which is projected to cost more than $2 trillion over its lifetime.
The Pentagon reported a $1 trillion balance in its Treasury account, but auditors found officials couldn't "adequately support" those numbers.
This isn't about minor accounting errors — it's systemic financial chaos that prevents Americans from knowing whether their tax dollars actually fund national defense or get wasted on studies about hypnotized sea creatures.
Shocking take: they probably don’t. Instead it’s either straight up theft, or money laundering to line some “strategic interest’s” pockets; really both.
Ernst has been fighting this battle for years.
Her COST Act built on the Stevens Amendment, a transparency provision first passed in 1989 that requires grant recipients to disclose federal funding percentages and amounts.
For more than 30 years, bureaucrats have largely ignored this requirement with zero consequences.
Ernst's law was supposed to fix that by giving the Office of Management and Budget authority to withhold grant money from recipients who refuse to disclose costs until they comply.
But the Pentagon clearly thinks transparency laws don't apply to them.
Instead of spending that R&D budget on weapons systems and military technology, bureaucrats funded octopus hypnosis research, elephant seal sleep studies, and monkey mind-reading experiments.
"Well, monkeys and seals and octopi, oh my!" Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation. "It's anyone's guess how much was spent on this questionable research because the price for taxpayers isn't provided, as required by law."
This is exactly why Ernst authored her COST Act in the first place.
"This is exactly why I authored my COST Act — to put an end to this shady spending and ensure folks in Iowa, and across the nation know exactly how their hard-earned money is being spent," Ernst continued.
The Pentagon's spending chaos mirrors patterns conservatives have exposed for years.
Senator Rand Paul's annual waste reports have documented similar outrages — the Air Force spending $1,300 per coffee cup on KC-10 aircraft, then replacing them instead of repairing broken handles at taxpayer expense of $32,000 for just 25 cups.
Boeing overcharged the Air Force by nearly 8,000% for soap dispensers, leading to a $149,072 overpayment for C-17 parts.
The Government Accountability Office revealed the Pentagon can't account for at least $220 billion worth of property including ammunition, missiles, and torpedoes.
But the research spending Ernst exposed takes Pentagon waste to a whole new level of absurdity.
Taxpayers funding studies on whether octopuses can be hypnotized sounds like a joke.
Except it's real, it used defense research dollars meant for weapons development, and nobody will say how much it cost because bureaucrats are breaking the law by hiding the price tags.
"If we want the Pentagon – the only federal agency that has never passed an audit – to clean up its books, putting public price tags on these funds can no longer be Mission Impossible," Ernst stated.
The Trump Administration now has a chance to force accountability that never existed under Biden.
DOGE's review of Pentagon spending has already identified waste, but Ernst's letter to the Inspector General could trigger a deeper investigation into whether the Department of War is systematically violating federal transparency laws.
The Pentagon's response will show whether the new administration is serious about ending the financial chaos that has defined defense spending for decades.
Sources:
- Harold Hutchison, "We Have No Idea How Much Pentagon Spent on Octopus 'Hypnosis,' Monkey Mind-Reading Studies," Daily Caller News Foundation, February 12, 2026.
- Joni Ernst, Letter to Department of War Inspector General, February 11, 2026.
- "Pentagon Fails Eighth Audit, Eyes 2028 Turnaround," Military.com, December 26, 2025.
- "Pentagon's Failed Audit Obscures How Taxpayer Dollars Are Actually Being Used," Yahoo News, December 25, 2025.
- "$1,500 Coffee Cups and $150,000 Soap Dispensers: Pentagon Waste Must End," The Heritage Foundation, 2024.
