THE PENTAGON — Defense Department Comptroller Mike McCord has expressed regret with the Pentagon’s decision to cover the spiraling cost-overruns of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with a payday loan, sources have learned.

“We had some trouble scraping together a few billion dollars to tide us over until the end of the Fiscal Year, and we thought we could get by with a payday loan,” McCord reportedly told Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. “We thought we’d be able to repay the loan in October, when we got our new Fiscal Year paycheck. But sequestration happened, and, well, we couldn’t pay back the loan right away.”

Sources inside the DOD claim McCord secured a loan for approximately $3.2 billion from E-Z Cash USA on Yadkin Road, just outside Fort Bragg, N.C.

“We thought it was a little unusual,” said Mike Temple, manager of E-Z Cash USA, “but we figured he was going to buy a really nice grill from Sunny’s Gold Teeth.”

Defense analysts at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) suspect the poor return on investment from the F-35 program are largely linked to the payday loan.

“We thought it was a little odd we’ve only seen a handful of fighter jets, having spent over a hundred billion on the F-35. Turns out, we were just repaying the interest on the loan,” said analyst Roger Munter at the Washington-based think-tank.

According to CNAS, the US should finish repaying the loan for the F-35 sometime around the year 3245.