Taxpayers own $31 billion in F-35 parts. The Pentagon can’t account for them all.

(The Center Square) – The federal government owns about 26 million spare parts for its fleet of F-35 fighter jets, but it cannot say where all of them are, what condition they are in or what taxpayers paid for them.

The Details

The department puts the value at about $31 billion, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Nov. 9, and says the real figure is probably higher because some parts are missing from its records. That's about $91 for every person in the United States.

The watchdog found the Department of War does not maintain complete records of the parts, which sit at more than 700 contractor and government facilities around the world. Allied militaries that fly the F-35 pay for access to the same pool, the report says.

Elaine McCusker, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former acting Pentagon comptroller, told The Center Square that because the parts are not tracked in real time, "the result can be repeat buying and/or lack of parts when and where they are needed."

GAO has flagged the same accountability problems since 2019. The new report says 26 of the 34 recommendations GAO and the Pentagon's inspector general have made on F-35 financial management were still open as of August.

In 2023, GAO reported that one of the program's two prime contractors had lost more than 1 million parts worth over $85 million. As of March 2026, the F-35 Joint Program Office still did not know the status of those losses. A reported loss can mean property that was damaged or destroyed, not necessarily missing, but the government is still supposed to determine what happened and who is responsible.

The contractor has since reported about $28 million in lost, damaged or destroyed parts dating back to 2012, GAO found. The Defense Contract Management Agency has so far determined it should be financially liable for about $6 million. Whether those newly reported losses include any of the $85 million is unknown. The program office never kept records of the outstanding cases, so it cannot tell.

GAO does not identify the contractor in the report, and declined to do so when asked. Lockheed Martin, which builds the aircraft, and Pratt & Whitney, which builds the engine, are the program's two prime contractors. Lockheed Martin did not respond to questions asking whether it is the company described. Pratt & Whitney, asked the same question Friday evening, had not answered by publication.

The F-35 Joint Program Office told The Center Square that the Department of War has concurred with all four of GAO's recommendations and is working to address them, including developing training for the officials responsible for tracking government property and building real-time data connections with contractor systems.

The program office did not answer questions about the lost parts or when it expects a complete count of what it owns. The Office of the Secretary of War did not respond to questions about the report.

GAO found the department's inventory system cannot talk directly to the contractors' systems, so the program office relies on data the companies send in. For the shared spare parts pool, that data arrives quarterly, which means some records are more than three months old. In one December 2025 submission, fewer than a third of the entries included a serial number, and nearly 6% listed an acquisition cost of a penny or less.

The program office has spent at least $17 million since 2020 counting parts, and GAO found the most recent count still did not confirm that the parts listed in its records actually exist. A full count is not feasible, program officials told GAO, because warehouses cannot stop work and there are not enough people to visit all 700-plus sites.

Congress has given the Pentagon until Dec. 31, 2028, to pass a clean financial audit, a requirement GAO notes was set in the 2024 defense authorization act. Because the program office could not do it, the Pentagon comptroller's office last March asked the Defense Contract Audit Agency to establish an auditable baseline. That agency is targeting March 2027 for its first full inventory.

McCusker said the agency will do what it takes to hit the March date, but that setting a statutory deadline carries its own risk, because meeting it becomes the top priority whether or not the underlying problems get fixed.