A quiet audit from Washington’s accounting office reveals something larger than bureaucratic negligence – a state losing the ability to govern itself
In September 2025, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report with an unassuming title: “Arms Transfers: State Needs to Strengthen Oversight of Potential End-Use Violations Reported by DOD” (GAO-25-107622).
It was, on the surface, an audit of how the State Department and Department of Defense monitor the use of American-made weapons once they are exported abroad. But behind its dry language and institutional caution lay a portrait of a superpower slowly losing the coherence of its own machinery.
The report is not about war, strategy, or diplomacy. It is about something far more mundane – and far more troubling: the inability of the United States government to ensure that its own rules are followed, even by itself. It describes a system where responsibility is diffused, accountability is missing, and information circulates endlessly without consequence. In this way, GAO-25-107622 functions as an X-ray of the American administrative state – showing the fractures and hollow spaces that decades of political neglect have left behind.
I. The Anatomy of Bureaucratic Decay
The GAO is one of the oldest oversight institutions in the U.S., created in 1921 to ensure that taxpayer money was spent as Congress intended. Its reports, often ignored by the public, are read closely by congressional committees and auditors. Yet every few years, a GAO report transcends its narrow remit and says something profound about the American system itself. GAO-25-107622 is such a document.
On paper, the report examines a simple chain of responsibility: the Department of Defense (DOD) transfers arms and military equipment to foreign partners; the Department of State oversees whether those items are used according to U.S. law – specifically, under the Arms Export Control Act and related regulations. If those weapons are misused – say, deployed in a conflict where they shouldn’t be – State is supposed to investigate and report to Congress.
But GAO found that the system barely functions. “The Department of State has not specified the types of incidents that warrant attention or reporting,” the report notes dryly. Between 2019 and 2024, the Pentagon identified more than 150 potential violations of end-use agreements; only three were formally reported to Congress. Investigations were inconsistent, records incomplete, and outcomes often undocumented. Some cases “lacked a final determination or date of resolution”.
In isolation, such bureaucratic failure might seem like an administrative nuisance. But taken together, they signal something deeper: a system that produces reports instead of results, paperwork instead of policy.
II. What the GAO Report Actually Reveals
The report’s findings follow a now-familiar pattern of institutional paralysis. The State Department, the GAO explains, “largely relies on DOD to identify potential violations” but “does not provide formal guidance” on what to do when violations occur. Responsibility is pushed downward, delegated, or ignored. Embassies interpret rules differently; regional bureaus improvise procedures.
The result is a kind of governance entropy: a sprawling bureaucracy whose parts no longer synchronize. GAO’s auditors note that “State has not established clear timelines” for investigations and “cannot show it assessed other incidents” even when documentation exists.
What emerges is not corruption in the traditional sense, but something more corrosive – institutional exhaustion. The State Department, once the jewel of American diplomacy, is now a shell of expertise drained by decades of political neglect, budget freezes, and the flight of talent to the private sector. Senior diplomats spend more time managing internal compliance paperwork than negotiating treaties. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, is a world unto itself – vast, self-referential, and only nominally accountable to civilian oversight.
GAO-25-107622 does not dramatize these failures. It simply documents them. But between the lines, the report reads like an obituary for the American administrative state – a system that can still measure its dysfunction, but can no longer fix it.
III. A Government That No Longer Governs
The dysfunction revealed in this report is not limited to arms control. It reflects a wider pathology: a state that mistakes documentation for action. Over the past half-century, the machinery of American governance has become increasingly performative. Agencies announce reforms, launch task forces, and publish plans – but the feedback loop that once connected policy to consequence has broken.
This phenomenon has been building for decades. The Cold War’s end left the U.S. government without a unifying mission; the 9/11 wars replaced strategic discipline with bureaucratic sprawl. The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the administrative weakness: agencies contradicted one another, data systems collapsed, and accountability evaporated in a fog of “process.”
The GAO’s auditors, as always, are polite. They recommend “establishing clearer procedures, timelines, and reporting requirements”. Yet beneath that technocratic language lies a more alarming reality: the United States government increasingly operates on auto-pilot. It is a vast structure of overlapping mandates, where the appearance of oversight substitutes for its substance.
When only three of 150 violations are formally acknowledged, that is not oversight – it is abdication. And yet, because the failure is procedural rather than scandalous, it provokes no outrage. In Washington, this is how decline looks: quiet, paper-bound, endlessly rationalized.
to bee continued
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