BURSTOn paper, the guardrails are clear. When the U.S. ships weapons overseas, partner governments promise three things: That they’ll use them only for authorized purposes, keep them secure, and not hand them off to third parties.
If those conditions are violated or serious suspicions arise that they are, the State Department is obligated to investigate and, in many cases, alert Congress.
In practice, however, a new Government Accountability Office report shows the system is ad hoc, with little guidance or follow through.
The State Department largely relies on overseas Defense Department officials for tips about potential end-use violations.
Since 2019, the Pentagon has flagged more than 150 incidents that could be violations. But the State Department has reported just three end-use violations to Capitol Hill.
The report added that the State Department hasn’t informed Congress what merits reporting and that it investigates violations inconsistently.
Experts in the arms trafficking and conflict monitoring are dismayed, calling the reported gaps an affront to both national and global security.
“It was really shocking to see how far the U.S had fallen behind,” said Kathi Lynn Austin, executive director of the Conflict Awareness Project, who added the number of potential incidents flagged was “extraordinary.”
“We are violating our law and not protecting our own security — at a time when there is so much volatility in the world,” Austin said. “We need to understand this is urgent, and Congress needs to push to maintain transparency and public trust in our arms dealings.”
The 39-page GAO report, published to little notice in September, lays out a simple mismatch: Defense personnel stationed abroad are often the first to see or hear about possible violations, but diplomats with the State Department haven’t told military officials clearly what to flag. (GAO, Pentagon, and State Department officials said the government shutdown left them unavailable to comment.)
In other instances of being tipped to potential violations, the GAO says, the State Department could not produce records showing whether anyone ever decided if the law’s reporting thresholds were met.
The Arms Export Control Act requires notifying Congress when there’s information that a substantial violation may have occurred regarding purpose, transfer, or security; it also requires reporting when an unauthorized transfer actually happens. Those are low thresholds for alerting the legislature, by design. Yet the GAO found no formal procedures inside the State Department for making, recording, and sharing their decision-making process.
In the report, the State Department agreed with GAO’s six recommendations, including providing concrete guidance to the Pentagon, standardizing investigations with timelines, and creating procedures for deciding and documenting what gets reported to Congress.
The GAO cannot force a federal agency to bend to its report and relies on voluntary compliance.
If the changes aren’t actually implemented, however, Congress will continue flying blind when it comes to U.S. arms sales negatively impacting national — and international — security.
The Misuse Pipeline
The mechanics of “end-use” sound bureaucratic, but the stakes aren’t. Around the world, U.S.-made weapons moves from legal sale to illicit use on the battlefield, stolen from depots, through corrupt commanders, transfers to proxies, or simple loss.
The results are everywhere. In Afghanistan, for instance, vast quantities of U.S.-supplied small arms and vehicles seeded regional black markets. Conflict Armament Research, a U.K. group that tracks conventional weapons, traced the Islamic State group’s ammunition stocks to dozens of countries — including U.S.-linked supply lines — often thanks to the chaos of collapsing units and unsecured stockpiles.
A recent Intercept investigation linked U.S manufactured rifle rounds to cartel slaughter in the heart of Mexico.
“The biggest concern for the average American citizen is the potential for these arms to be used against us,” said Brandon Philips, a public affairs professor at California State University, East Bay. “We are in a position right now where we aren’t everyone’s favorite country.”
“The biggest concern for the average American citizen is the potential for these arms to be used against us.”
When the government puts tracking systems in place, however, more of the leaks get plugged. In Ukraine — a challenging venue for containing arms flows because of the sheer quantity of material being introduced — early Pentagon watchdog reviews faulted shortfalls in tracking designated sensitive items amid an active war. Follow-ups found marked improvement as the U.S. expanded “enhanced end-use monitoring,” boosted staffing, and raised compliance rates.
Even with a partner government that has strong incentives to cooperate, effective control requires sustained, well-resourced checks. But the U.S doesn’t even have a system for how those checks should happen.
In its report, the GAO zeroed in on this vagueness. Overseas Defense Department staffers told the watchdog they’re using “professional judgment” to decide what should rise to the State Department’s attention because the State Department hasn’t defined the incident types, thresholds, or timelines.
The ambiguity increases the odds that important cases fall into a bureaucratic void, never formally investigated or reported. The GAO even found examples where one incident drew a full document review and coordination, while a similar one drew no action at all.
“A number of us for years have talked about insufficiencies around end-of-use monitoring, and this report continues to show the problems of how this is done,” said Jeff Abramson, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank. “The American people are attuned that a lot of harm is caused in the world by our weapons.”
The infrastructure exists to track weapons — the State Department has systems to vet its direct buyers, and the Pentagon has a program for enhanced end-use monitoring. But the GAO found that the connective tissue of such programs doesn’t.
“The fact that this report is mostly about things that happened during the Biden administration, and the second part of Trump, shows it’s a systemic problem. It shows that we are going sell things and not bother,” said John Lindsay-Poland, coordinator of the nonprofit Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico. Poland noted that the report only covers a small portion of government-to-government sales, while the bulk of U.S. arms exports are commercial sales and small arms.
“If your priority is selling stuff,” he said, “taking into account whether the stuff you’re selling is massacring people, destroying communities, strengthening terrorists and drug trafficking, or driving immigration is secondary.”
Gaza and Double Standards
The GAO’s accounting of the oversight vacuum comes at an incendiary moment.
In 2024, the Biden administration put a policy in place that required assessments of whether partners receiving U.S. arms in active conflicts were using them consistent with international humanitarian law.
In May 2024, the administration’s report to Congress concluded it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used U.S.-provided arms in ways “inconsistent” with international law in some instances, while adding that wartime conditions made case-by-case attribution hard. Human rights groups blasted the equivocation and urged suspensions; Israel rejected the accusations.
In February 2025, the new administration scrapped the policy.
The Gaza debate is precisely where a functioning end-use system should be strongest.
Independent investigators and journalists have documented repeated Israeli strikes that allegedly used U.S.-origin munitions against protected sites or in ways that were indiscriminate. The State Department’s own human rights reporting, before becoming hollowed out this year under President Donald Trump, catalogued grave harms.
Abramson, who has tracked global armament and misuse, said failure to monitor end-use violations and report them to Congress can put American foreign policy in a diplomatic chokehold.
“Around the world,” he said, “we are trying to make friends, But when they have seen our weapons being misused it undermines that ability, and makes us seem hypocritical, dangerous.”
The post The State Department Isn’t Telling Congress When U.S. Weapons Fall Into the Wrong Hands appeared first on The Intercept.