Axios: Fastest-growing jobs

 📈 Fastest-growing jobs
 
A bar chart showing the occupations projected to add the most jobs between 2025 and 2035. The top growing occupation is home health care aides, which is projected to add 847.3k jobs. ItData: BLS. Chart: Erin Davis/Axios Visuals

Health care and social assistance jobs are projected to see the most growth over the next decade, Axios’ Emily Peck writes from a new government report.

🧑‍⚕️ There will be about 847,000 new home health and personal care aide jobs created from 2025 to 2035, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects.

Other fields with big expected growth: registered nurses, health services managers and nurse practitioners.

That’s fueled by America’s aging population, which needs more care.

🤖 Yes, but: The report also forecasts job losses across several occupations as a result of AI and automation.

It projects about 752,000 fewer office and admin support jobs over the next decade, for example.

Go deeper … See the data.
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Futurism: AI-Controlled Drones to Kill … Nvidia Chips

Russia Now Using Fully AI-Controlled Drones to Kill Ukrainian Civilians, Powered by Nvidia Chips

Russia Now Using Fully AI-Controlled Drones to Kill Ukrainian Civilians, Powered by Nvidia Chips

“In a few years, we will be living in a ‘Terminator’ movie. It’s no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike.”

By Victor Tangermann

Published Aug 28, 2026 11:47 AM EDT

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A police officer inspects collected fragments of a Russian kamikaze drone "Molniya-1" at the site of its impact.
Valeriia Yemets/Suspilne Ukraine/JSC “UA:PBC”/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

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In a joint statement earlier this week, United Nations chief António Guterres and Red Cross president Mirjana Spoljaric Egger sent out an urgent message.

“We are now dangerously close to crossing a moral red line: the autonomous targeting of humans by machines,” they said.

But while international humanitarian law strictly forbids targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, Russia is reportedly already using AI-controlled drones to kill innocent people in Ukraine.

Ukrainian military commanders and forensics experts told the New York Times that fully autonomous Russian drones, piloted by an experimental AI system, are targeting civilians back on the ground in Zaporizhzhia, a city in southeastern Ukraine. One such drone was able to pick out its exact target — propane tanks near a gas station — and strike them.

The implications of autonomous machine-guided deadly weapons being used on the battlefield are dire.

“This is a risk for the whole world,” Zaporizhzhia air defenses commander Serhiy Minaiev told the NYT. “In a few years, we will be living in a ‘Terminator’ movie. It’s no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike.”

Forensic experts recovered onboard minicomputers, developed by AI chipmaker Nvidia, that allowed the drones to identify their own targets. The AI chip modules, known as Jetson Orin, are intended to be used by robotics students and for space computing applications.

The drones didn’t have any antennas and didn’t emit any radio frequencies, ruling out they were piloted from Russian soldiers remotely, the military officials said. While the NYT points out that the absence of an antenna doesn’t in itself prove the drones are entirely being steered by an AI, a more conventional auto-piloting system wouldn’t require an Nvidia AI chip.

The autonomous drones use AI-guided camera systems to recognize possible targets, a step up over existing “last mile” AI-assisted drones that use the tech to home in on targets pre-selected by remote human pilots.

The ethical implications of having these machine learning algorithm-targeting drones — or “killer robots” — target civilians without any human intervention at all are dire, a practice that has long been decried by international rights groups, including the UN and the Red Cross.

“States must show political courage and move beyond incremental discussions towards decisive action,” the two organizations said in their recent joint statement. “Innovation must serve humanity — not endanger it.”

More on killer drones: Russia May Have Used Terrifying AI-Powered “Suicide Drones” in Ukraine

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Victor Tangermann

Senior Editor

I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.

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DW: Trump renames Lake Ontario ‘Lake America’

Trump renames Lake Ontario ‘Lake America’

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Channel 4: Trump’s like a NEW ROMAN EMPEROR – Robert Harris

Aug 28, 2026 Ways to Change The World | Podcast

Historical novelist Robert Harris writes about the Roman Empire – and says the parallels of disillusionment with modern day politics are ‘impossible’ to ignore. [Subscribe to our Substack newsletter: https://channel4news.substack.com/sub…] In this episode of Ways to Change the World, he tells Krishnan Guru-Murthy that Donald Trump’s ‘vanity projects’ and strong man tactics remind him of Emperor Augustus, how the pressure to appease the masses is ‘crushing politicians into a form where it’s impossible for them to operate’ and why historians might look back and see the Brexit vote as ‘the first big crack’ in British democracy. Robert Harris’ latest book ‘Agrippa’ is out now.

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GZERO Media: Should we rethink the global aging crisis. Ian Bremmer. Can governments boost birth rates?

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Dr Phil Podcast: Mother on Trial. The Lindsay Clancy case.

121,335 views Aug 25, 2026 Dr. Phil Highlights

Lindsay Clancy admits she killed her three young children. What the jury must decide is whether she was legally responsible for their deaths. Prosecutors say Clancy deliberately sent her husband out of the house before strangling 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan, arguing her actions show planning, awareness and an understanding that what she was doing was wrong.The defense tells a very different story, arguing that Clancy’s mental health deteriorated after childbirth and that bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis left her unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions. Her journals documented severe insomnia, anxiety, depression and feelings of “drowning,” while psychiatric experts sharply disagree over her mental state and her claim that a voice commanded her to kill. Dr. Phil analyzes the competing evidence, the psychology behind the defense and prosecution arguments, and the central question of the Lindsay Clancy trial: mental illness or legal insanity? Sponsored by Preserve Gold: Get up to $20,000 in FREE Gold & Silver with a qualified purchase. CALL: 844-718-2642 Text ASKPHIL to 50505 or visit https://DrPhilgold.com Sponsor: CarShield is how you move from chaos to control. Their protection plans are built to cover a deep bench of mechanical issues, thousands of parts across cars, trucks, and SUVs… without putting a cap on how far you drive. That’s not just coverage. That’s control. Call CarShield today: 1-800-588-8501 more info: https://carshield.com/ Experience a side of Dr. Phil McGraw you may have been missing as he provides critical information on some of the most important issues we face today. McGraw delves into the minds of the most exciting and accomplished people. From celebrities to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, to the world’s leading experts, every guest and topic is provocative, informative, and relevant. http://drphilpodcast.com Dr. Phil McGraw, one of the most well-known and trusted mental health professionals in the world, is the host of daytime TV’s top-rated program, Dr. Phil. This trailblazing and award-winning platform continues to provide the most comprehensive forum on mental health issues in the history of television. Dr. McGraw’s unique ability to take complicated and technical information and make it accessible and understandable to the general public has distinguished him both among viewers and within his profession. Follow for more Dr. Phil & The Dr. Phil Podcast: Dr. Phil Show –    / @drphil   Podcast – https://www.drphilpodcast.com/

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Michael Smerconish: Could YOU Live Under Meta’s New Rules? Dollars U.S. 28 Billion Settlement

Aug 27, 2026

Go to http://vanman.shop/michael and use code MICHAEL for 15% off your first order. For free and unbiased Medicare help, dial 507-478-7579 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter, or go to https://askchapter.org/smerconishPaid Partnership

Meta and its Facebook and Instagram platforms have agreed to a massive settlement over claims that social media harmed kids — including new restrictions aimed at limiting teens’ screen time. Michael Smerconish thinks the changes are a good step. But they raise a much bigger question: Could adults live by the same rules? Two hours a day. Apps dark after midnight. Notifications silenced during the day. And all of it against a backdrop in which Americans are spending less and less time face-to-face with one another. Maybe the problem isn’t only what social media is doing to kids. Maybe it’s what it has done to all of us. Could you live under the same restrictions being placed on teenagers?

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The Deep View: Nvidia eyes Hugging Face in full-stack AI push

Nvidia eyes Hugging Face in full-stack AI push

Nvidia may be taking one step closer to dominating the open-source AI ecosystem.
 

The tech giant has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the dominant repository of open-source AI models, for $12.9 billion, according to a report by The Information, citing a source familiar with the agreement. This is a strategic move that allows Nvidia to diversify its portfolio from just chipsets and take ownership of more of the AI stack.This would give Nvidia ownership over the “front door for open AI innovation,” Ashish Nadkarni, Group VP of enterprise infrastructure at IDC, told The Deep View. “Owning that front door gives NVIDIA a major position in the mindshare of today’s AI development personas.

“The deal comes as Nvidia faces mounting pressure from the very labs that rely on its chips. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are each moving toward custom or co-designed AI silicon, a shift that threatens Nvidia’s near-monopoly on AI hardware. Worse for Nvidia, these labs bring something it can’t easily replicate: deep, firsthand knowledge of the models the chips are meant to run, letting them tune hardware for performance in ways a general-purpose chipmaker can’t match. 

Hugging Face could eventually become a non-chip source of revenue for Nvidia, which could spur more growth if chip revenue eventually stops skyrocketing. A small caveat, however, is that, according to the report, Hugging Face has only generated  $150 million in annualized revenue thus far. That makes Nvidia’s payment about 80 times the startup’s forward revenue, the report notes. 

Revenue aside, the advantage of being both a model and chip maker is a key reason Nvidia has invested heavily in open-source models. Nvidia’s commitment has been reflected not only in signing an open letter supporting the ecosystem, but also in internal investment in and development of open-source models, such as its Nemotron models. Of course, the Hugging Face acquisition moves that forward.

Additionally, there’s a significant robotics angle: Nvidia already has a strong position with its Jetson, Isaac, and Omniverse solutions, and Hugging Face’s own robotics efforts give Nvidia another point of leverage as physical AI becomes the next frontier. And just today, Hugging Face unveiled Microduck, a $399 open-source robot that learns new tricks via reinforcement learning.

Even its looks resemble the Nvidia “Blue” research robot, inspired by Star Wars’ BD-1, shown at demos, live events, and Disney. Still, as Nadkarni highlights, the acquisition would also mean there would be less choice in the industry. “To the extent that others like Intel, Apple, and AMD make similar plays, there will be fewer “ecosystem-neutral” platforms in the market,” said Nadkarni. “Note how Microsoft has gradually made GitHub more like an extension of its own strategy (and for its own benefit).”This is a landmark move for Nvidia, as it solidifies its efforts to be not just a chip company, but one that aims to own multiple layers of the AI stack at once. Hugging Face has become something like the GitHub of AI: serving as the industry’s central hub for sharing models, datasets, and applications. Owning that layer, on top of the hardware layer Nvidia already dominates, deepens the moat. Already, nearly every open model runs on Nvidia GPUs, and buying the platform where those models live removes any ambiguity. It’s also a defensive play: as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Amazon push to build their own custom chips, controlling the distribution layer keeps developers tied to Nvidia’s ecosystem regardless of who’s building the silicon.
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Psychiatric Times: The 5 Faces of Bipolar Depression: A Case-Based Reflection. Comment: Bipolar applies to me for over 30 years; take medications including lithium so managed. Please note star *My absolute concurrence that patient ought to try to comply with this. Beautifully written by a senior psychiatrist in Baghdad but shared. Please if you know a family trying to cope with a diagnosis of bipolar – it is a pathway. Please share.

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Long-Acting Injectable Therapy in the Management of Adult Patients with Schizophrenia|

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The 5 Faces of Bipolar Depression: A Case-Based Reflection

Author(s)Hameed Younis, MD

Bipolar depression does not have a single face. Through one patient’s journey, this case-based reflection explores 5 distinct presentations and how each can shape clinical recognition and treatment.

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Bipolar depression is more than a state of sadness; in clinical practice, it often appears as a disorder of lived time. During hypomania, time accelerates and possibilities expand; during depression, time collapses into an immobile present; and in mixed states, time becomes unbearable, filled with agitation, and despair without rest.1 Understanding this altered experience requires more than symptom recognition—it also requires a treatment approach that extends beyond pharmacotherapy.

*Effective management extends beyond medication to include psychoeducation, relapse prevention, monitoring of sleep and early warning signs, suicide-risk assessment, medication adherence, family involvement when possible, and the gradual restoration of routine, agency, and reciprocal relationships.2

Pharmacological management should therefore be embedded within these broader plans. US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved treatments for bipolar depression have expanded over the past 2 decades. Currently approved agents include the olanzapine–fluoxetine combination (approved 2003), quetiapine (2006), lurasidone (2013), cariprazine (2019), and lumateperone (2021). Lamotrigine remains approved for maintenance treatment and prevention of depressive relapses, whereas lithium continues to occupy a central role because of its efficacy in maintenance treatment and evidence suggesting a reduction in suicide risk, despite lacking FDA approval for acute bipolar depression.3,4

Between the recommendations of clinical practice and the reality of everyday life lies the patient’s story. Here, our patient Mustafa’s journey illustrates how bipolar depression may unfold long before it becomes diagnostically recognizable and evolves through a series of psychological phases that are not part of any diagnostic manual yet are deeply familiar to many clinicians who accompany patients through recovery.

A Patient’s Narrative

Before Mustafa’s illness acquired a name, his life had already begun to change. He was a 22-year-old student preparing for his sixth-grade examinations in Baghdad when philosophy slowly replaced ordinary study, and sleeplessness began to feel like clarity rather than exhaustion. He spoke intensely about reality and consciousness, walked unusually long distances across the city, and became increasingly irritable when others failed to understand his ideas. What first appeared as ambition or intellectual awakening gradually became acceleration, disinhibition, and estrangement. By the time despair appeared, it was not a simple depressive collapse, but the aftermath of a mind that had promised him exceptional meaning and then left him unable to live with its consequences.

The following phases are not formal diagnostic stages but a clinical framework that emerged from one patient’s journey and may resonate with experiences commonly encountered in practice.

1. Despair Phase

I first met Mustafa at a medical ward at Baghdad Teaching Hospital after a serious suicide attempt by overdose. At our first encounter, his central complaint was not merely sadness, but a collapse of meaning. He felt that his life had become unworthy of continuation. What had first appeared to him as discovery had become, to others, acceleration and chaos. His irritability had grown, his judgment had weakened, and he was increasingly unable to recognize the social consequences of his behavior.

Alongside this psychic acceleration, he became more disinhibited, engaging in risky acts and long, purposeless walks across Baghdad, from Karrada to Taji, as though his body had been recruited by the restlessness of his mind.

This was the first paradox: his suicidal despair had not emerged from simple depression alone, but from the exhaustion that follows acceleration. The exhilaration had burned itself out before he confronted the emptiness that followed.

2. Denial Phase

Mustafa initially could not accept the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He compared himself with friends, with internet descriptions, and with the popular caricature of bipolarity as a simple alternation between happiness and sadness. Because his suffering did not resemble these stereotypes, he concluded that the diagnosis must be wrong.

He told me: “My episodes do not stop. I do not have several months of normal life. Most of my episodes are mixed. There is no daily life for me at all, so it was difficult to find myself in the typical bipolar disorder I searched for on Google or ChatGPT.”

His denial was not mere resistance. It was also an attempt to preserve identity. To accept the diagnosis meant accepting that some of his most intimate experiences, his thoughts, energies, ambitions, and convictions, might also be symptoms. The diagnosis threatened not only his health narrative, but his authorship of himself. Because of this, he resisted lithium and other mood stabilizers. He preferred to think of his condition as a personality problem that could be treated through behavioral therapy alone. Medication, to him, felt like an admission that the self could not be trusted.

In one message, he wrote: “What am I going to do now? I understand that I need to take my medication, but what am I going to do with this diagnosis? I need help understanding how I should handle it.” This was the beginning of diagnostic grief: not grief over what he had lost, but grief over the person he was no longer sure he had ever been.

3. Dependency (Childlike) Phase

Eventually, Mustafa accepted the diagnosis, but acceptance did not immediately bring agency. Depression left him depleted, indecisive, and unable to organize ordinary life. He began to depend on his clinician for small decisions: how to eat, when to sleep, whether to go out, what to read, what to say to family and friends.

These questions seemed childish on the surface, but they reflected a deeper regression produced by depression. When the internal world loses structure, the external world becomes impossible to navigate. The patient does not only ask for advice; he asks to borrow another person’s mind, until he gradually learns to trust his own again. The therapeutic relationship became one of the few spaces where experience could be translated into meaning. For the duration of the session, life seemed manageable. Every symptom had a name, every behavior a context, every fear a possible explanation.

This phase carries its own danger. The clinician may become, in the patient’s imagination, not merely a doctor, but a temporary organizer of reality. The task, therefore, is not to enjoy being needed, but to return the patient gradually to himself.

4. Self-Defeating Phase

As the depressive phase deepened, Mustafa became increasingly vulnerable to guilt, inadequacy, and shame. Pleasure felt undeserved. Rest felt like laziness. Hope felt naïve. He described his mind as his worst enemy. This metaphor was clinically revealing. Where there is an enemy, there is aggression—and in Mustafa, aggression had turned inward. It appeared as self-criticism, self-deprivation, and repeated self-sabotage.

He was agreeable, sometimes excessively so. He placed the needs of others before his own, including mine. Beneath this compliance was a fear of abandonment. He seemed to believe that to have needs was to risk rejection, and that to disappoint others was to disappear from their care.

In this phase, depression was not only biological suffering. Depression became an internal courtroom in which Mustafa served simultaneously as the prosecutor, the judge, and the accused. The therapeutic work required helping him distinguish responsibility from guilt, remorse from self-hatred, and discipline from punishment.

5. Coping Phase

Gradually, Mustafa began to name his states rather than be possessed by them. Naming did not cure him, but it created distance. What could be named could be observed; what could be observed could sometimes be survived.

Our relationship shifted from dependence toward interdependence. He began to recognize warning signs, challenge negative beliefs, maintain routines, and seek reciprocal relationships rather than relationships built only on rescue. One of his later messages read:

“It still felt like a battle to get out of bed, or even to breathe every day, but somehow that was okay, because I knew it would end.”

This sentence marked a quiet transformation. Recovery was not the arrival of permanent happiness. It was the restoration of temporal faith: the belief that a state is not a destiny, that an episode is not the whole self, and that despair, however persuasive, is not always prophetic.

In this sense, recovery did not mean the absence of bipolar disorder. It meant recovering authorship over a life that had once seemed entirely dictated by the illness.

Clinical Relevance

Looking back, Mustafa did not move through these phases in a straight line. He revisited some, lingered in others, and occasionally returned to places he thought he had left behind. Recovery was not a destination but a changing relationship with his illness.4 Bipolar depression remained part of his story, but it no longer wrote the story for him.

Although the 5 phases described here are not intended as a formal diagnostic model, they provide a practical clinical framework that can help psychiatrists recognize subtle shifts in a patient’s psychological state, strengthen the therapeutic alliance, anticipate barriers to engagement, and tailor interventions to the patient’s needs at a given moment. 

The same individual may move between despair, denial, dependency, self-defeating patterns, and adaptive coping over time, often requiring clinicians to adjust not only pharmacologic strategies but also communication, psychoeducation, and psychotherapeutic support. Rather than viewing bipolar depression solely through the lens of symptom checklists, attending to these evolving psychological states encourages a more individualized and recovery-oriented approach to care.

In daily practice, the value of this framework is not in placing patients into a specific phase, but in recognizing that their experience of bipolar depression changes over time. As these changes occur, the same treatment approach may no longer fit the patient’s needs, even when symptom severity appears similar. Paying attention to these shifts can help clinicians better understand changes in behavior, reconsider treatment priorities, and adapt both pharmacologic and psychosocial interventions. Seen this way, bipolar depression is not a fixed condition assessed at each visit, but an evolving clinical process that requires ongoing clinical judgment.

Dr Younis is a senior psychiatrist in the department of psychiatry at Baghdad Teaching Hospital, Iraq.

References

1. Taylor DM, Barnes TRE, Young AH. The Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines in Psychiatry. 15th ed. Wiley-Blackwell; 2025.

2. Yatham LN, Kennedy SH, Parikh SV, et al. Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments and International Society for Bipolar Disorders 2018 guidelines for the management of patients with bipolar disorder. Bipolar Disord. 2018;20(2):97–170.

3. Ghaemi SN. Feeling and time: the phenomenology of mood disorders, depressive realism, and existential psychotherapy. Schizophr Bull. 2007;33(1):122-130.

4. Li S, Xu C, Hu S, et al. Efficacy and tolerability of FDA-approved atypical antipsychotics for the treatment of bipolar depression: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. Eur Psychiatry. 2024;67(1):e29.

5. Todd NJ, Jones SH, Lobban FA. “Recovery” in bipolar disorder: how can service users be supported through a self-management intervention? A qualitative focus group study. J Ment Health. 2012;21(2):114–126.

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Fortune: Pete Hegseth is worried about the Pentagon’s ‘Soviet-style bureaucracy,’ but the military’s $285 billion maintenance mess is all-American

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Pete Hegseth is worried about the Pentagon’s ‘Soviet-style bureaucracy,’ but the military’s $285 billion maintenance mess is all-American

Sasha Rogelberg

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Sasha Rogelberg

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August 27, 2026, 10:47 AM ET

Pete Hegseth runs his hand through his hair and holds a microphone with his other hand.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has previously criticized the Pentagon bureaucracy for resembling the Soviet Union.Leon Neal—Getty Images

Shortly after he became Trump’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth warned that the American military risked a late Soviet-style decline. Speaking before a group of defense executives in November 2025, he teased comparisons with the USSR and even the Chinese Communist Party as he described an “adversary” that poses a serious threat to the United States of America. “The adversary I’m talking about is much closer to home,” he said. “It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the process.”

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This March, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, pulled into port at Souda Bay, Greece, scheduled for more than a week of repairs. More than 200 of its sailors were receiving treatment for smoke inhalation, a result of a laundry room fire that spread through the ventilation system into the carrier’s sleeping quarters.

The USS Gerald R. Ford was at sea for 10 months, long past its deployment length, and was reportedly dealing with electrical problems and delayed maintenance that led to overworked equipment. That was on top of sewage problems on the ship that left its crew unable to use its toilets.

According to Linda Bilmes, a Harvard Kennedy School public policy lecturer and author of The Ghost Budget: U.S. War Spending and Fiscal Transparency, the USS Gerald R. Ford represents a larger problem for the U.S. military: a massive tract of infrastructure and facilities without the proper structures to maintain them.

“Here you have $13 billion spent on the highest tech carrier in the entire navy, and somehow there wasn’t a sufficient amount of money spent on maintaining the laundry conditions and the toilets,” Bilmes told Fortune. “That’s just one example, but you have to question whether the resources are being allocated in a way that provides maximum benefits.” 

A report published last week from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s audit institution, found that across the Department of Defense’s real estate portfolio of more than 700,000 facilities around the world—some of which are at least 50 years old or date back to the Cold War—the department is dealing with a $285 billion maintenance backlog in fiscal 2025 as a result of insufficient funding and personnel.

The findings included “chronically neglected” maintenance of some barracks that adversely affected the quality of life of enlisted service members, posing safety risks due to mold and broken fire systems. The report also noted crumbling parking lots at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, which have been in disrepair since at least 2018, as well as narrow quarters at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in California, which could not accommodate the maintenance of Marine Corps vehicles.

“This poses a risk to its missions and the quality of life of its personnel,” the report said.

The Pentagon did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

The U.S. diverging from the Soviet military downfall

This isn’t a matter of just one administration mismanaging money. The Pentagon is the only major federal agency that has never passed an audit. While the department attributes the opacity around its procurement and distribution of its massive, $1 trillion budget to the sheer size of the agency and its responsibilities, the GAO has found evidence instead of pervasive money mismanagement. For example, the Navy lost track of $3 billion in equipment over the last three years, and at one Naval distribution center, there was a backlog of 122,000 items that had not been processed, and as a result, the Navy bought equipment and supplies it didn’t need.

Hegseth’s implied Soviet comparison recalls the rigid structures that prioritized quantity over quality, leading the former superpower to spend up to 15% to 30% of its GDP on military industry, starving its economy and leading to its downfall. He called for defense acquisition reform, as well as systems streamlining contracting.

But the U.S.’s defense spending has key differences from the USSR, chiefly that it spends just about 3% of its GDP on defense. While the Soviet Union saw its military collapse because it became a poor country that ran out of resources, the U.S. military’s exorbitant maintenance is instead a result of a wealthy country continuing to misallocate funds as its budget swells.

Policy experts like Bilmes suggest this trend is not just a perennial problem, but one unlikely to reverse anytime soon. 

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