Yves here. The idea of a favorite scandal no doubt sounds like an oxymoron. But you may have books or movies you went back too often, or enjoy ritual performances holiday music or traditional dances. One of their appeals is that they are immutable and provide an anchor of sorts. The long-standing Pentagon audit failure is like that.
The Pentagon already has a huge black budget but that’s apparently not good enough to feed its maw of unending need (correct me if I have this wrong, but isn’t that a lot like always hungry Rahu?) And the inability to keep proper books is just a remarkable way to syphon off even more funds. It also proves, BTW, that MMT is indeed an accurate description of how the funding of a currency issuer like the US works. As one wag said, “We never worried about where the money for the next bombing run in Iraq was coming from.”
Consider this as support for the idea that poor records, whether by accident or design, covers for overspending. From The Cradle:
Furthermore, in 2019 alone, the Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments – a figure larger than the entire US economy.The Pentagon budget is not only gargantuan, but replete with waste – from vast overcharges for spare parts, and weapons that don’t work, to forever wars with far reaching human and economic consequences.
These shadowy practices have, however, boosted the profits of US weapons makers like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, with major gains made despite the challenges posed by inflation and supply chain issues caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
By Lindsay Koshgarian, who directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Originally published by OtherWords.org.
The Pentagon just failed its audit — again. For the sixth time in a row, the agency that accounts for half the money Congress approves each year can’t figure out what it did with all that money.
For a brief recap, the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Until 2018, it had never even completed one.
Since then, the Pentagon has done an audit every year and given itself a participation prize each time. Yet despite this year’s triumphant press release — titled “DOD Makes Incremental Progress Towards Clean Audit” — it has failed every time.
In its most recent audit, the Pentagon was able to account for just half of its $3.8 trillion in assets (including equipment, facilities, etc). That means $1.9 trillion is unaccounted for — more than the entire budget Congress agreed to for the current fiscal year.
No other federal agency could get away with this. There would be congressional hearings. There would be demands to remove agency leaders, or to defund those agencies. Every other major federal agency has passed an audit, proving that it knows where taxpayer dollars it is entrusted with are going.
Yet Congress is poised to approve another $840 billion for the Pentagon despite its failures.
In fact, by my count Congress has approved $3.9 trillion in Pentagon spending since the first failed audit in 2018. Tens of billions have gone through the Pentagon to fund wars in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and now Israel. Accountability for those “assets” — including weapons and equipment — is also in question.
At this point, lawmakers surely know those funds may never be accounted for. And year after year, half of the Pentagon budget goes to corporate weapons contractors and other corporations who profiteer from this lack of accountability.
There is an entity whose job it is to prevent this sort of abuse: Congress. With each failure at the Pentagon, Congress is failing, too. Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached, they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.
Meanwhile, all those other agencies that have passed their audits could put those funds to much better use serving the public. Too many Americans are struggling to afford necessities like housing, heat, health care, and child care, and meanwhile our country is grappling with homelessness, the opioid epidemic, and increasingly common catastrophic weather events.
With another government shutdown debate looming in early 2024, you’ll hear lawmakers say we need to cut those already inadequate investments in working families. But if they’re worried about spending, they should start with the agency that has somehow lost track of nearly $2 trillion worth of publicly funded resources.