The Pentagon repeated its history of audit failure for the sixth consecutive year, unable to account for $1.9 trillion of its $3.8 trillion in assets. Despite the failures, Congress continues to increase Pentagon spending every year. Since the first failed audit in 2018, Congress approved approximately $3.9 trillion in Pentagon spending, with billions flowing unaccounted for.
By Lindsay Koshgarian
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Lindsay Koshgarian directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
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Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Comments
10 responses to “The Pentagon Fails Its Audit Again—and Again and Again and Again and Again and Again”
Another sick joke, trying to get accountability from the entity that owns the government.
Many years ago the Vatican (Catholic Church) was beginning to get many complaints from people around the world who could not fund the Catholic schools any longer. They were asking where the money was going. So finally, the church did an audit and discovered that they owned most of the businesses in Italy; they didn’t know that previously. Supposedly the Catholic Church remediated the problem and the money flow was going to where it was supposed to go, wherever that was. It’s doubtful that anybody knows where it’s going or where it’s supposed to go in either the Vatican or Washington DC and probably never will unless the citizens take control of the government; in either case that’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
Simply put, the Govs is the problem ….Period
Far too simply…
I feel that credit must be given where credit is due, according to all sources Ukraine is the most corrupt country in history. That is after the one the takes the palm in that record, the United States of America. Any dissenters?
We are all witnessing a country that is falling apart. I realized this more than twenty years ago. I also realize that the financial system in America is in trouble as well.
Unfortunately, I have a good memory and remember very well how during the 9/11 self inflicted terrorist attack, it became known the details of the fall of building 7. First of all, there was a CIA office in the building and also a Pentagon records depository where an audit showed that TRILLIONS of dollars from the Department of Defense financial audit were missing, how convenient. This is another critical bit of information that backs my contention about the long lived corruption of the US regime at all levels. Now again we are told of audit after audit failure to explain fabulous amounts of people’s money missing and unaccounted for. I know for a fact that my accusations are 100% correct as proven by the record.
Scrdmgl:
The real problem is the national debt, too many social welfare programs, corruption at all levels of government, the moral standard of our society is declining, interest on the national debt is now racing at a rate of one trillion dollars a year, a trade deficit out of control as we use more products made overseas, illegal drug use in this country is out of control, illegal immigration is out of control, and on and on with my list. It will all come to an end within the next few years. Then all hell will break out.
The controlling elements of the US government have all the missing accounts.A continuous heist of taxpayers money. The consequences are obvious. Poverty is increasing mediocre medical care no real public transportation high property taxes and unplanned urban sprawl.plus plus. Americans are so deeply buried in their patriotism that has dumbed them down into an ableist of unrealistic reality.
Very good reply.
Disadvantaged