The U.S. Approved a Record $117.9 Billion in Weapons Sales. The Reviewers Clearing Them Are Short-Staffed.

Before a fighter jet, a missile, or even a training manual can be sold to an ally, someone inside the Pentagon has to decide it is safe to let that country have it.▸ That decision — Technology Release and Foreign Disclosure, TRFD in the government's own shorthand — sits inside every Foreign Military Sales (FMS) case, and it is done by people, not software. In FY2024, the money side of that system moved a record $117.9 billion in approved sales. The staffing side of it did not keep pace: the Navy told the Pentagon it is short 126 full-time employees needed to do the reviewing, and most of the ten organizations DOD surveyed said they'd missed their own deadlines because of it.

The Foreign Military Sales system is how foreign governments buy American weapons government-to-government rather than straight from a contractor.▸ In FY2024 it moved $117.9 billion in defense articles and services — the highest annual total on record, according to the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, and a 45.7% jump from $80.9 billion the year before. Most of that, $96.9 billion, was cash: allies and partner nations paying their own way. Another $11.8 billion ran through Foreign Military Financing, the U.S. grant-and-loan program that helps partners afford the sale, and $9.2 billion came from Pentagon and State Department programs that build up a partner's own military capacity. Turkey's F-16 fleet upgrade ($23.0 billion) and Israel's F-15 order ($18.8 billion) alone accounted for a third of the year's total, per the same fact sheet.

That $117.9 billion is only the sales completed in one year.▸ The pipeline behind it is far larger: the State Department reported 16,227 open FMS cases worth more than $845 billion still working their way through the system as of FY2024 — offers accepted, money committed, deliveries and paperwork still pending, in some cases for years.

Every one of those cases can require a TRFD review before technology changes hands, and DOD's own accounting says it doesn't have enough people to do the review on schedule.▸ DOD's December 2024 report to Congress — known inside the department as the "918 Report" after the statute that required it — found that the Navy had an estimated shortfall of 126 full-time TRFD-related employees even as the number of cases requiring review kept climbing. Of the ten DOD organizations surveyed for that report, six said they had missed TRFD review deadlines and pointed to inadequate staffing as a reason, according to the Government Accountability Office's independent assessment, published June 26, 2026.

GAO's interviews with officials filled in why.▸ Review timelines that should take days can stretch toward a year when no policy precedent covers a request. Foreign disclosure officers — the people who actually sign off — often rotate out on 6-month to 3-year assignments "just as they become proficient," GAO wrote, and mandatory rotations, a government-wide hiring freeze, and retirements have all thinned the ranks further. A National Disclosure Policy Committee review, on paper, is supposed to take 10 business days; officials told GAO the real timeframes "varied" once a case was contested.

The Pentagon knows the gap exists.▸ Executive Order 14268, issued April 2025, directed a set of TRFD reforms, and DOD built a 33-item implementation plan around it with an internal one-year deadline. As of May 2026, 26 of those 33 action items were complete, GAO found, with the rest targeted for November 2026. One completed reform — a 2017-era policy update that delegates more sign-off authority away from the National Disclosure Policy Committee — is estimated to save about 10 business days of processing time on every case that no longer needs that committee's review. None of the reforms so far add headcount; DSCA's own recommendation, still pending, is that DOD get relief from hiring restrictions so it can bring in outside disclosure specialists faster.

Dollar figures are FY2024 as reported by the State Department; staffing and deadline figures are drawn from DOD's December 2024 "918 Report" as independently cited and verified in GAO's June 2026 report, and reflect conditions as of that report's fieldwork (April 2025–June 2026) unless otherwise noted.