Buried among more than 1,200 proposed amendments to the Department of War’s (DOW) 2027 proposed spending bill is one requiring public disclosure of nearly $100 billion in obscure Pentagon military research and development (R&D) spending.

The amendment offered in the House Rules Committee by Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.) mandates posting on the USASpending.gov website all DOW contracts awarded under the Other Transaction Agreements (OTA) provision of federal law that is available for use “in carrying out basic, applied, and advanced research projects” in all four U.S. military branches.

The USASpending.gov website was created as a result of the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 that mandated public disclosure of virtually all federal expenditures. Moore’s amendment closes a loophole under which DOW officials claimed to be exempt from OTA contracts.

Moore’s amendment requires that “any project carried out by the Department of Defense using other transaction authority under section 4021 of title 10, United States Code, shall be reported in the same manner as other Department of Defense expenditures for inclusion in the searchable public website established by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006.”

The House Rules panel has not yet made public its schedule for considering the flood of proposed amendments to the DOW spending measure, officially known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2027.

The Moore amendment does not cover OTAs created by officials at other agencies, but Moore and Panetta also have introduced separate legislation — the Stop Secret Spending (SSS) bill that is a companion to the Senate version of the same name — in the House, making it clear all OTA spending must be disclosed on the USASpending.gov website. Senators Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Gary Peters (D-Mich.) are co-sponsors in the upper chamber, while Rep. Jim Panetta (D-Calif.) joined Moore as a co-sponsor in the House.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform approved the SSS in March on a unanimous vote. The Senate version was passed on a unanimous vote earlier this month and sent over to the House. A conference committee would be required should the House version be approved with different provisions.

“Federal agencies should be disclosing every taxpayer dollar they spend, especially as we close in on $37 trillion in national debt. Unfortunately, the current OTA loophole allows these agencies to spend billions and leave Americans in the dark,” Moore said in a joint statement earlier this year with Ernst, Peters, and Panetta.

An internal congressional analysis reviewed by The Washington Stand indicated that DOW spent $98.2 billion on OTAs between October 2019 and March 26, 2026, while the Department of Interior obligated $915 million and the Department of Homeland Security $577.6 million during the same period, for a six-year total of $99.7 billion.

Advocates of OTAs claim such spending is being publicly disclosed now via the federal government’s System for Award Management’s website at SAM.gov. They also argue that OTAs are especially important for military R&D spending because the authority shortens and simplifies the acquisition process. A significant portion of DOW OTA expenditures are made by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

But the internal congressional analysis reviewed by TWS described extreme difficulties staffers encountered in using the SAM system because it places OTA data in a category labeled “Other Transaction Information,” and users must go through an initial 10 codes before logging on to the system, which then requires going through an additional 10 codes. Multiple other SAM system obstacles are described by the analysis as follows:

“You have to go to the ‘Data Bank’ tab, scroll to the third page, and know to click on ‘Other Transaction Actions and Dollars’ — which again does not match any known reference to OTAs. Users must then know to delete their organization code, in order to execute a search. And then if you can find the OTA list, under OTI Reports, users need to know (somehow) to right-click a column and scroll to ‘drill’ then to the award data option, essentially navigating and right clicking on just the right column and the right term (how would normal people know to do that?), then users can get an Excel file that goes on for miles, off even big computer monitors.”

In other words, the analysis continued, “that’s not even remotely a simple or transparent process, and the USASpending.gov website lists lots of other DOD spending, as it should, in nice viewable, searchable outputs.”

The SAM system only includes data on OTA contracts issued by DOW, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and NASA.