The Pentagon Doesn’t Know What it Spent 8.5 Trillion Dollars on
When government is completely dysfunctional and seems not to serve
the people’s interests, we have to wonder where our tax dollars are
going. Thanks to a Reuters investigation
by Scot Paltrow, we have an answer—or, rather, a non-answer.
Apparently, the Pentagon has made use of $8.5 trillion of our tax money
handed over by Congress since 1996—but don’t ask what was done with the
money. The Department of Defense doesn’t have a clue.
Audits of all federal agencies were mandated by law beginning in 1996, but the Pentagon is unique in never
having complied. In almost 20 years, the Pentagon has never accounted
for trillions it spent, in part because “plugging”—fudging the
numbers—is standard operating procedure.
According to the investigation, employees of the Defense Finance and
Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s primary accounting agency, were
routinely told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions.”
These plugs—which amounted to falsifying the books—were used to bring
the military’s figures in line with the Treasury’s when discrepancies
couldn’t be traced and accounted for. According to DFAS employee, Linda
Woodford, “A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate. We didn’t have the detail . . . for a lot of it.” This
so-called plugging isn’t unique to DFAS—when it comes to resolving lost
or missing information, it’s just business as usual in every branch of
the service.
When it was announced that the military’s budget would be cut by $52
billion in 2014, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had a fit, telling a defense conference: “[The
cuts are] too deep, too steep, and too abrupt. This is an irresponsible
way to govern and it forces the department into a very bad set of
choices.” This is quite befuddling to the rest of us, as the $581 billion budget that year was more than the total of the next 10 biggest spenders combined—including Russia, China, and even Saudi Arabia (whose military budget made up 10.7% of their total GDP). In fact, the US budget was a full one-third of the entire amount spent on defense worldwide.
If the DoD is this concerned about losing money to budget cuts, perhaps
it should consider tackling its own systemic irresponsibility and
discern what, precisely, $8.5 trillion in taxpayer funds has already
paid for.
