On Wednesday, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord revealed that the Department of Defense had failed its sixth audit in a row, with no significant improvements over the last year.
“We are working hard to address audit findings as well as recommendations from the Government Accountability Office,” McCord said in a statement. “The Components are making good progress resulting in meaningful benefits, but we must do more.”
In a repeat of last year’s audit, just one in four of the Pentagon’s auditing units received a clean bill of financial health, though auditors claimed they made some progress in accounting for the agency’s $3.8 billion in assets. McCord said that a clean audit likely remains years away, according to Reuters.
The Pentagon remains the only federal agency to have never passed an audit. Its failure to make significant progress has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who called for an independent audit of the department.
“The recent failure of the Pentagon's 6TH audit couldn't make it clearer that we need accountability & transparency,” Paul posted on X. “No institution is above scrutiny, especially the DoD [with] the largest budget of ANY [federal] agency.”
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee also slammed the Pentagon for its financial troubles, arguing in a post on X that the department’s “inability to adequately track assets risks our military readiness and represents a flagrant disregard for taxpayer funds, even as it receives nearly a trillion dollars annually.”
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said the news showed that it’s “time to stop misdirecting hundreds of billions of dollars away from domestic and human needs to pad unnecessary budget lines for endless wars, failed weapons, & the Pentagon’s corporate handouts.”
The news could reinvigorate efforts to impose a 1 percent budget cut on any parts of the military that fail an audit, a policy that would “provide a much greater incentive to get financial books in order,” according to Jennifer Knox of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“[T]his isn’t just a matter of clean accounting; it’s a matter of security,” Knox argued. “Ensuring that defense dollars are spent effectively and appropriately will improve performance while reducing spending.”
Top image credit: President Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin participate in a joint press conference in Anchorage, Alaska, Friday, August 15, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
The deep freeze in U.S.-Russia relations shows occasional, promising cracks. It happened recently not on the primary issue of conflict — the war on Ukraine — but on a matter of mutual survival. During the United Nations General Assembly President Donald Trump announced an initiative to address one of arms control's most intractable problems: verifying compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).
"To prevent potential disasters, I'm announcing today that my administration will lead an international effort to enforce the biological weapons convention by pioneering an AI verification system that everyone can trust,” Trump said. He framed this as an urgent priority, claiming "many countries are continuing extremely risky research into bioweapons and man-made pathogens."
The proposal found immediate endorsement in Moscow. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov offered unusually direct support, calling the initiative "brilliant in itself" and declaring that "Moscow supports it." Crucially, Peskov proposed concrete next steps, suggesting the U.S. proposal should be negotiated and formally codified in international agreements.
This high-level response is significant for at least two reasons: first, it signals to Washington that Moscow is open to dialogue on issues of strategic stability, despite Trump’s latest rhetorical shift suggesting Ukraine can win the war against Russia and calling Russia a “paper tiger.”
And second, it marks a departure from Moscow's persistent accusations of the U.S. running bioweapons development in Ukraine under the cover of legitimate health research (these allegations were never proven). Given that context, Peskov's constructive tone was particularly noteworthy.
That creates a tangible diplomatic opening with a critical deadline looming: the meetings of the BWC working group and of the state parties is scheduled for December 15-17 in Geneva. The U.S. could use Russia’s positive reaction to discreetly test the approach known as compartmentalization: separate the intractable conflict in Ukraine from managing existential risks between adversarial great powers.
Contrary to hawks who’d oppose any diplomatic engagement with Russia, engaging on BWC does not “legitimize” Russia’s war in Ukraine. It protects a fundamental U.S. security interest that exists independently of it. The inclusion of China in the same context would broaden the initiative’s strategic value. Beijing’s disposition is certainly worth testing — unlike on nuclear weapons where it guards its sovereignty zealously, its position on the biological weapons may be more cooperative.
The imperative to focus on BWC is even more compelling given that, unlike other weapons treaties, the bioweapons convention has never provided for a verification mechanism. The obstacles are substantial. Experts note that much of the legitimate biological research could be dual-use — both for benevolent (medicines) and malevolent (weapons) ends. The research involves thousands of institutions worldwide, while potential weapons programs could be hidden anywhere from industrial facilities to university laboratories.
The last serious effort to create a verification system collapsed in 2001 when the Bush administration rejected a proposed mechanism for the BWC, upending seven years of multilateral negotiations. The situation was further exacerbated by the mysterious, and still unresolved, anthrax incidents that in the febrile post-September 11 atmosphere caused panic of a terrorist biological attack.
After years of paralysis on that front, BWC members agreed in 2022 to resume the work on verification mechanisms. The December meeting in Geneva to review and codify the relevant working group’s recommendations (already drafted but not yet made public) offers an opportunity to advance on the initiative Trump talked about at the U.N.
However, any progress would require a patient, sustained diplomatic engagement that has characterized past successes in arms control, particularly in multilateral frameworks. This pace and method clash with the current administration’s preference for unilateralism and quick wins.
Trump’s own transactional approach to foreign relations may be another self-made hurdle. He may have undermined his own opening in the same U.N. speech by telling world leaders their countries "are going to hell" while appearing to question the purpose of the U.N. — hardly a way to build the multilateral cooperation necessary for success of an initiative he claims to champion.
Furthermore, questions persist about the level of technical expertise within government agencies necessary to enhance Washington's ability to navigate this complex landscape. Developing a credible verification system, enhanced by harnessing the AI potential — while managing the legitimate privacy concerns and technical hurdles — requires deep institutional, technical and legal knowledge that appears to have diminished in recent years.
The path forward requires extensive dialogue and technical work. The fundamental question is whether the administration can maintain focus on this welcome, but complex initiative. The December meeting represents more than just another diplomatic gathering — it’s a test as to whether the political will can be found and sustained in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing to walk through the unexpected opening. Success would not signal friendship, but a mature, pragmatic recognition that some existential dangers demand cooperation even among adversaries — or perhaps particularly among them.
A successful outcome in Geneva, measured by even a modest agreement on core principles for verification, compliance, transparency, and the use of AI, could generate good will to be invested in future, more complex negotiations — with nuclear arms control at the forefront.
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Top photo credit: global shipping (Shutterstock/APChanel); Donald Trump (Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock)
In an unexpected move, the Trump administration has announced publicly that it supports renewing the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) for one year, and is interested in considering entering discussions on the long-term renewal of AGOA.
AGOA, which expired on September 30, was originally passed by Congress in 2000 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The legislation allows sub-Saharan African countries duty-free access to American markets, and gives the U.S. president the power to suspend countries that he believes fail to meet AGOA’s requirements, particularly as they relate to governance issues, human rights standards, and a failure to provide American companies beneficial access to African markets. It was last renewed in 2015.
As such, AGOA serves as the most comprehensive preferential trade arrangement between the United States and sub-Saharan African countries today, allowing duty-free access for over 5,000 goods from 32 African countries. That said, Rwanda’s AGOA eligibility remains partially restricted due to its government’s decision to increase trade barriers on American apparel products. Meanwhile, a group of 17 sub-Saharan countries have been entirely suspended from AGOA due to their failure, as determined by the U.S. president, to meet eligibility requirements.
AGOA is quite popular among African diplomats and business leaders, as well as Africans employed in AGOA-eligible businesses, as it affords African businesses who sell to the American market major advantages over competitors from wealthier countries. The duty-free access allows African businesses the opportunity to compete with multinational corporations from wealthier countries which, through economies of scale and other advantages, can produce goods at a cheaper price than can smaller African-based companies.
Without AGOA, many of these African businesses would be unable to compete with larger international corporations, and would be forced to shift their focus away from the American market, risking a dramatic decrease in revenue for these businesses. For this reason, governments of AGOA-eligible countries have been steadfast supporters of the legislation, even though Trump’s recent slew of tariffs between 10% and 30% has diluted some of AGOA’s duty-free advantages.
Although many factors have contributed to the struggle African countries have faced in trying to improve their economic condition, connecting African businesses to American markets through AGOA has been a net positive for African countries, and in some ways has counteracted other challenges stifling African economies.
In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Garth Frazer and Johannes Van Biesebroeck found that “in the context of the preferences offered under AGOA, none of the other limitations frequently cited in the African context — poor infrastructure, distorted product and credit markets, high risk, inadequate social capital, and poor public services — proved to be binding constraints to expanding exports under AGOA.” In other words, Africa’s other challenges are not holding back AGOA from increasing African exports to the United States, which helps enrich African businesses and improves local economies.
Trump’s interest in extending AGOA by a year is further evidence that the president is actively trying to find where American and African interests intersect, and to pounce on it as an opportunity to improve U.S.-Africa relations and advance American interests.
In June, the president signed a peace agreement that his administration helped broker between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda to attempt to end a decades-long conflict between the two countries, though fighting has continued between rebel groups and the DRC since. As a corollary to the peace deal, the Trump team is negotiating mineral deals with both countries.
According to reports, the president’s leading Africa advisor Massad Boulos is also trying to achieve a lasting peace agreement between rival factions in the devastating Sudanese Civil War, though no serious progress has been made in efforts there.
Extending AGOA would continue to keep the United States relevant in African geopolitical and geoeconomic affairs in the face of inevitable great power competition with China, which is implementing its own set of free trade agreements with all African countries without conditions, as announced during last year’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation.
According to Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at CSIS, a Washington-based think tank, AGOA’s “real value lies in the realm of soft power.” Baskaran says that letting AGOA expire sends “a damaging signal about the future of U.S. commercial diplomacy on the continent. When African governments see comparable opportunities from both the United States and China in the mining sector, they will be more likely to lean toward Beijing.”
Although AGOA has historically received bipartisan support in the United States it is not without its controversies.
Some experts have lamented the fact that AGOA eligibility can be unilaterally suspended by the U.S. president if he determines an African country has committed human rights or governance abuses. They argue that as a trade agreement, AGOA should remain principally focused on economic exchange, and not focused on subjective, Washington-defined considerations about human rights and governance.
Further, AGOA is not a traditional free trade agreement (FTA). Unlike FTAs, AGOA isn’t reciprocal, meaning that it does not require all parties to reduce or remove tariffs on imports from all other treaty countries. Although AGOA allows the president the right to suspend a country if he feels it is unfairly implementing barriers to American companies, it only requires the United States to remove trade barriers for listed goods coming from AGOA-eligible countries. American businesses, on the other hand, continue to face barriers when exporting to African markets.
If AGOA is to be extended long-term, these are among the concerns that will have to be resolved during negotiations in Congress.
In the meantime, though, the fact that the president is interested in extending AGOA for one year while debate over its long-term future takes place is a positive step in ensuring the United States remains relevant for African commercial and diplomatic partners.
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Top image credit: A U.S. Army soldier (2R) trains Nigerian Army soldiers at a military compound in Jaji, Nigeria, February 14, 2018. To match Special Report NIGERIA-MILITARY/INTERNATIONAL Capt. James Sheehan/U.S. Army/Handout via REUTERS
The report, which has previously affected the country’s eligibility for security assistance, confirmed what civil society groups have been saying for years: that the security forces of Nigeria, Washington’s most significant ally in Sub-Saharan Africa, habitually operate with impunity and without due regard for human rights protection — a key condition for receiving U.S. security cooperation.
For example, the report spotlighted the following human rights abuses as ongoing concerns: “arbitrary and unlawful killings; disappearances; or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious abuses in a conflict.”
It also claimed that “military operations against ISIS-WA, Boko Haram, and criminal organization targets” often resulted in civilian deaths. Other findings include the use of “excessive force,” “sexual violence and other forms of abuse” by the military in the pursuit of jihadists, as well as inappropriate detention for prolonged periods and often in poor conditions of women and children removed from or allegedly associated with jihadists reportedly for “security screening and perceived intelligence value.”
Interestingly, the new arms sale is meant for exactly the same theater of operations where the above alleged abuses have reportedly occurred. There, in the treacherous terrain of the country’s northeast, Nigeria’s army has been fighting for more than a decade in a bloody stand-off with jihadists. The arms are also meant for use in and around the Gulf of Guinea where piracy and illegal trafficking of arms, humans and narcotics pose new challenges.
What this means therefore is that if approved, U.S.-origin weapons comprising an assortment of munitions, precision bombs, rockets and related equipment would arm units of Nigeria’s security forces whose egregious abuses bordering on war crimes are confirmed not just by civil societies but by the U.S. State Department.
Since the 1950s, the U.S. has been the world’s leading arms-exporting nation accounting between 2019 and 2023 for 42 percent of all global arms exports. Several laws exist ostensibly to regulate and ensure that U.S. security assistance is provided to allies without undermining America’s core values. For example, Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act expressly forbids the United States from providing security assistance to any country whose government engages in a “consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Investigations by human rights groups and the media, including Reuters and Premium Times, have uncovered a consistent pattern of abuse by security forces that suggests that Nigeria has met this threshold.
However, not once have any of the relevant legal provisions conditioning arms sales on respect for human rights and civilian harm concerns been enforced. Indeed, successive U.S. administrations since the 1970s, Democrats and Republicans alike, have routinely ignored them while there is as yet no record of Congress successfully stopping an arms sale on this account — although it has delayed some. In 2022, during the Biden administration, Congress blocked a planned shipment of 12 AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters to Nigeria over human rights concern, but this was soon reversed.
This divergence between what the U.S. law says and what the government actually does reflects a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Washington’s foreign policy between its human rights advocacy and the pursuit of global military primacy, in part through arms sales. It is a contradiction the world has seen play out in the bloody conflict in the Middle East where, despite carrying out a genocide in Gaza, Israelremains a top recipient of U.S. security assistance.
As the Center for Civilian in Conflict (CIVIC) noted in a recent report, Washington often “elevates other competing priorities, including addressing threats from non-state actors and strategic competition by other key powers, over concerns for civilian protection and human rights even where significant fears exist about potential misuse of U.S. security assistance.”
The contradiction has grown even more recently as America’s global hegemony faces growing challenges in an increasingly multipolar world. Therefore, besides its role in counterterrorism operations against jihadists in the Sahel, Nigeria’s potential as a likely constraint on the growing influence of China and, more recently, Russia and Turkey in Sub-Saharan Africa makes it an ally too dear to lose.
But while all U.S. administrations have ultimately prioritized America’s global military primacy over any other concerns, Trump has gone much further than most by cutting staffing and shuttering programs in the Pentagon that previously helped put human rights and civilian harms mitigation at the heart of U.S. security assistance. The net result is that today, Washington is less able to guarantee the appropriate use of U.S.-origin weapons, thus increasing the risk of abuse.
The situation is further complicated by the interest of America’s “Military Industrial Complex” to maintain profitability by selling to U.S. partners older weapons systems for which the Pentagon no longer has any use. Consequently, U.S. security assistance to Nigeria has grown exponentially over the past two decades. It includes $1.5 billion in government-to-government Foreign Military Sales and over $200 million in direct commercial sales by U.S. companies. This is in addition to a program of periodic trainings and joint military drills in which different units of Nigeria’s military have participated.
These efforts, however, have so far failed to turn the tide on the insecurity that increasingly plagues the country. Several factors are responsible, chief of which include corruption, accountability challenges, and lack of motivation among the rank and file. “As quickly as the U.S. sends money and arms, the resources are often diverted from their intended destination,” Brad Brandon, founder and CEO of Across Nigeria, observes.
Besides, acquiring advanced weaponry is one thing; the ability to use it in an effective and responsible manner is another. Despite racking up significant air strike capabilities over the years thanks mostly to U.S. security assistance, the Nigerian military continues to suffer a substantial deficit in its Air-to-Ground Integration; that is, air assets do not often have reliable communication with ground forces when targeting their bombs.
This has led to a series of catastrophic “air strike mistakes” starting with the mistaken bombing, in which the U.S. reportedly played an indirect secret role, of a displaced persons camp in Rann in Borno state in 2017 which killed more than 236 civilians. According to a Reuters analysis of violent incidents documented by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), more than 2,600 people had been killed over a period of five years in 248 air strikes by the Nigerian Air Force.
On April 10 last year, an air strike by Nigeria’s air force on a village in Zamfara state meant to eliminate bandits resulted in the killing of 33 people. Despite the acquisition, four years ago, of at least 12 Super Tucano light attack aircraft boasting enhanced air-to-ground communications capabilities, as well as precision-guided weapons-delivery systems, the carnage has continued with the most recent mishap occurring in January.
So, while Nigeria’s security sector is hopeful that the new arms package could aid the country’s air force carry out more precise strikes and thereby reduce civilian casualties, recent experience shows that this is not necessarily assured. This is because the new weaponry would be operating in institutional settings that are not only ill-suited to reducing civilian harm, but also resistant to accountability.
Washington thus would be taking a big risk if the sale goes through without extracting sufficient guarantees for the responsible use of the weaponry alongside accountability measures to protect civilians. This should be combined with restoring Pentagon programs dedicated to civilian harm mitigation to send a clear message to recipient nations where Washington stands on this crucial issue.
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