GAO finds 17,000 F-35 parts absent from Pentagon records

The Government Accountability Office found that the Pentagon’s F-35 program office had not entered about 17,000 parts undergoing maintenance or repair into its inventory system, leaving components valued at about $1.3 billion unrecorded as of March 2026. Officials said the value could reach $2.5 billion when additional costs and missing data are included.

The findings concern a much larger pool of roughly 26 million F-35 parts, valued at about $31 billion and held at more than 700 government and contractor facilities worldwide. GAO said records for those parts were outdated, incomplete or inaccurate, limiting the Defense Department’s ability to account for the equipment and produce reliable financial reports.

The program office relies on contractor data submitted quarterly because its inventory system does not connect directly to prime contractors’ property systems. GAO said some entries can therefore be more than three months old, and the office lacks complete procedures to verify the submitted information. Physical inventories costing at least $17 million since fiscal 2020 also have not fully confirmed that recorded parts are present or that all parts on hand are listed.