In a new op-ed for RealClearPolicy, our CEO & Co-Founder Brandon Card makes the case that the Pentagon's push toward its first clean audit is solving the wrong problem.
The headline number is real.
The Department of Defense manages roughly $445 billion a year across 226,000 contracts, covering everything from aircraft carriers to translation services, and after eight straight audit failures, it's finally on track to pass one by 2028.
DOGE and Congress deserve credit for the spending-visibility push that got it there.
But Brandon's point is that visibility into spending is necessary, not sufficient. Every dollar Congress appropriates becomes a contractual obligation first, with its own pricing terms, milestones, renewal rights, and exit clauses.
Right now, that intelligence sits buried inside millions of PDFs and disconnected systems. No team, no matter how good, can track obligations like that by hand.
His argument: a contract isn't legal paperwork you file away until renewal.
It's a financial asset, the actual source of truth behind every invoice, every supplier obligation, every piece of audit evidence. Fortune 500 companies have already figured this out. They're using AI to extract that intelligence at scale instead of leaving it locked in file cabinets and shared drives.
The opportunity for the Pentagon isn't replacing the people managing these portfolios.
It's finally giving them the visibility to do their jobs, so they can see what their own contracts actually say at the speed and scale the mission requires.
As Brandon puts it, passing the audit is the statutory checkbox. Seeing what's actually in your contracts is the real prize.
Read the full op-ed on RealClearPolicy: Government Contracts Are a Financial Asset
