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Open Record archive

  1. The Bill for the War Comes Due at the Checkout Counter
  2. A State Spends Its Force Abroad and Its Patience at Home
  3. The Security State Turns Its Tools Inward
  4. The Iran War Keeps Exporting Its Costs
  5. Power Turns on Its Witnesses
  6. A Government That Performs Power
  7. Firing Squad Meant to Be Watched
  8. The War Is Now the Economy
  9. War Abroad Party at Home
  10. Guardrails Left a Map
  11. Who Decides Who Pays
  12. Pressure Campaign Reaches Brazil
  13. Record Caught Up
  14. Machinery Pointed Inward
  15. Bond Market Prices the Deficit
  16. Three Ways an Argument Disappears
  17. The Machinery Keeps Running
  18. The War Is Now a Domestic Story
  19. Who Counts Not Who Votes
  20. No to a Map Yes to a Database
  21. Power Was Visible Accountability Was Not
  22. Records Landed Claims Did Not Hold
  23. Projected Power Argument at Home
  24. Washington Is Rationing What the Public Sees
  25. Who Gets to See What Power Is Doing
  26. Power Moves in Days
  27. Four Institutions Four Judges
  28. The Loud Fight Ends
  29. The Bill Came Due
  30. Six Institutions Said No
  31. Saying Stop Is Not Stopping
  32. AI Slowdown Accountability Gap
  33. Cost Arriving Channel Narrowing
  34. The Question Is Who Pays
  35. Washington Offers a Check
  36. Dividend Promise Failing Election Machinery
  37. War Automated Faster Than Accounted For
  38. Nineteen Months
  39. The Election Is Now a Docket
  40. The Rule Is Not the Safeguard
  41. The Price Walked Into an Election
  42. Outrunning Review
  43. Machinery of Who Counts
  44. War's Real Bill Arrives Far From the Gulf
  45. The Legal Justification Comes Last
  46. A Price, Not a Front
  47. The Price of a War Nobody Calls a War
  48. War's Second Front Is Economic
  49. Three Instruments, One Method
  50. Fight Over the Machinery
  51. Documents Caught Up With Statements
  52. Capacity Without Checks
  53. The Machinery Is Not Failing
  54. Coercion Is the Policy
  55. You Cannot Sue a Bond Market
  56. War Washington Cannot End
  57. Blockade and Bond Market
  58. The Bill Comes Due
  59. Money Lost, Surveillance Won
  60. Government Stopped Showing Its Work
  61. Routed Around, Not Repealed
  62. Enforcement Turned Inward
  63. Past the Point It Can Hold
  64. What It Cost to Lose
  65. Who Holds the Veto
  66. Risk Moves Down
  67. The Government Rents Its Surveillance
  68. The Powers Expand, the Checks Sit Empty
  69. The Promise Was Only Worth the Pressure Behind It
  70. The Senate Traded Away Its Leverage
  71. Two Orders and a Shrinking Stockpile
  72. What Money Bought
  73. Money Lost Michigan, Won Missouri
  74. Change the Accounting
  75. Two Clocks
  76. Who Decides What Counts as a Threat
  77. The Claim Arrives First

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Military Command

A civilian protection program dismantled over every commander's objection, and a budget its own department cannot read.

What the record shows

Every combatant commander told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth not to eliminate the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program, ProPublica found in the internal record, and he cut it from roughly 200 staff to about 24 anyway. The Pentagon's Civilian Protection Center of Excellence went from 40 people to 9 during 2025, and Central Command's civilian harm team was cut to 1. Central Command said that as of May it had 1 active civilian casualty investigation open, into the 28 February strike on a school in Minab, Iran. The Pentagon's annual civilian casualty report to Congress counted the 2025 boat-strike campaign at zero civilian dead, and on 10 September the United States skipped the NATO meeting of the civilian harm group it co-founded in 2023.

The war with Iran is drawing down the rest of the force. A leaked deployment order book dated 14 August, reported by the Washington Post at the end of August, shows 4 commanders covering Europe, the Pacific and South America, plus the Navy's senior admiral, filing formal non-concurrences that they could not perform their assigned missions. Hegseth extended the deployment of 50,000 troops in the Middle East into mid-2027 over those objections. The Center for Strategic and International Studies found Patriot interceptor stocks down from 2,330 before the war to fewer than 830.

The count of American casualties is itself disputed. The Pentagon's database, as The Intercept reported on 28 September, showed 861 service members injured and at least 19 dead, 11 by hostile fire, after 37 names were added without announcement; the Washington Post reported more deaths than the Pentagon has disclosed, and Hegseth called that a lie.

The money is hard to follow. Congress appropriated $1 trillion for defense in 2026, ProPublica's series argues the budget is deliberately opaque, and the Pentagon has never passed a full audit. In a State of the Force address at Quantico on 30 September, Hegseth announced a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command targeted for 1 October 2027, a 20% cut to general and flag officer billets, and a future-of-warfare study led in part by Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey of Anduril, who sell the country weapons.

Standing summary, carried forward and rewritten as the coverage moves. Every claim is sourced either to a dated edition below or to the named body that made the finding.

21 editions