Congress Spends $1.53 Billion a Year on a Grocery Discount It Can't Verify

The Defense Commissary Agency runs 235 grocery stores on military installations in the United States and 13 other countries, headquartered at Fort Gregg-Adams, Virginia, per the agency's FY2026 budget justification.▸ Its entire reason for existing is a single promise: sell groceries to service members and their families for less than a civilian supermarket would charge. Congress pays for that promise directly, every year, as a line item. The question is whether the promise is still being kept — and the Government Accountability Office has already found that DeCA itself can't say for sure.

DeCA's Commissary Operations fund runs on three sources of cash: a direct appropriation, a sliver of other income, and — this year — a drawdown of whatever cash is left in reserve. All of it goes to keep the stores open.

The headline number is the direct appropriation: $1,527.8 million for fiscal 2026, down slightly from $1,570.2 million the year before.▸ But the same budget document shows total expenses of $1,590.8 million against total income — appropriation plus fees and card revenue — of only $1,551.0 million. The $39.9 million gap is covered by drawing DeCA's accumulated cash reserve down to exactly zero by the end of the fiscal year, per the same table. Most of the money goes where you'd expect for any retailer: $874.3 million in salaries and wages for a workforce of 12,615 civilian full-time employees, and another $329.3 million in contracted services. $184.2 million pays rent, utilities, and communications across 235 stores in 13 countries, and $203.1 million more covers the freight to move groceries there, supplies, travel, and other operating costs.

None of that spending is inherently a problem — it's what it takes to run 235 grocery stores.▸ The problem GAO identified is narrower and sharper: DeCA exists specifically to deliver a savings rate to patrons, and the agency can't prove it's delivering it. DeCA's internal target is a 23.7% customer savings rate — the share by which commissary prices are supposed to undercut comparable civilian grocery stores, per GAO's June 2022 report. GAO found that DeCA only hits that global target by relying on its savings rate for stores outside the continental United States (OCONUS) — and that the OCONUS methodology "is unreliable, as it does not include required price comparisons based on actual price data." Domestic stores, the ones nearly all 235 locations actually are, consistently underperform the target on their own. GAO made three recommendations to fix the methodology; DOD concurred with all three.

If the discount were working and patrons valued it, sales should be holding steady or growing along with the patron base. Instead:

Sales fell from about $6.0 billion in FY2015 to about $4.4 billion in FY2021 — a decline of more than $1 billion in six years, the finding that prompted GAO's review in the first place.▸ The same 2022 report found that of roughly 8 million eligible patron households, only about 1.5 million were shopping regularly — leaving 6.5 million eligible customers who choose not to shop there at all. DeCA's own FY2026 budget projects sales recovering to $5,025.8 million this year, still short of the FY2015 peak, against a patron base the agency now counts at 8.8 million households generating nearly 70 million transactions a year. More patrons, and still fewer real dollars of grocery business than a decade ago.

Dollar figures for the fund flow are DeCA's own FY2026 budget estimates and may not sum exactly due to independent rounding in the source tables. The 8-million and 1.5-million patron figures are GAO's 2022 findings; the 8.8-million patron count is DeCA's own current FY2026 estimate — the two are not from the same year and are presented as such.