The Pentagon has no idea where over $2 trillion of its own assets are
2022 marks the fifth year in a row the Pentagon has failed its audit
For the fifth year in a row, the Pentagon has failed its audit, unable to account for more than half of its $3.5 trillion in assets.
After 1,600 auditors combed through the Department of Defense's $3.5 trillion in assets, officials found that the department couldn’t account for about 61 percent of its assets, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord told reporters back in November.
“I would not say that we flunked. The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want,” he said.
Some quick math: 61 percent of $3.5 trillion is $2.135 trillion. That’s how much money in assets the Pentagon just straight up lost and cannot account for. I would say that’s a pretty damning failure.
In related news, the Expanded Child Tax Credit that sent monthly checks of up to $300 per child to most families in 2021 — and subsequently cut child poverty by 36 percent — cost about $100 billion, about 4.7 percent of $2.135 trillion. (The expanded credit expired at the end of 2021, and by one estimate, 3.7 million more children fell back into poverty in January of this year.)
Again, $2.135 trillion is the amount of money the Pentagon has no idea where it went.
It also cost $11 billion — 0.5 percent of $2.135 trillion — to expand the Department of Agriculture’s program that subsidizes school lunches to give every child free lunch at school for one year. (Congress, shamefully, let the expansion expire this year, resulting in many more hungry kids at school).
Last year, the Navy’s proposed budget said that it would cost about $6.9 billion for two nuclear attack submarines (just TWO). As of 2021, the US has 68 operational submarines.
Intergenerational childhood poverty? No problem. Hungry kids at school? Who cares? Only 68 submarines for the Navy? Oh geez, we better spend nearly $7 billion to get two more.
The news of the Pentagon failing its audit came as no surprise to Pentagon watchers. After all, the US military has the distinction of being the only US government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit. Federal law since the early 1990s requires mandatory audits for all government agencies, and since fiscal year 2013 all but the DOD have been able to satisfy that requirement.
If the Defense Department can’t get its books straight, how can it be trusted with a budget of more than $800 billion per year?
Examples of wasteful spending at the Pentagon are as plentiful as they are egregious. The most famous recent example is the notoriously expensive Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet program, which has gone over its original budget by at least $165 billion and is costing more than $1.7 trillion in its estimated life cycle.
$1.7 trillion for fighter jets. Again, expanding the child tax credit to families in need for one year would cost $100 billion. Expanding the subsidized school lunch program to give every kid free lunch at school for one year would cost $11 billion.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Senator Bernie Sanders proposed legislation last year that would cut one percent off the top of the budget of any part of the Pentagon that fails an audit. If the proposal had already passed, 20 of the agency’s 27 auditing units would face a budget cut this year. (To break up the work of the audit, the department holds 27 separate, smaller audits and then combines the information to get the bigger picture.)
The lack of accountability from the Pentagon hasn’t stopped lawmakers from throwing money at them. The annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is what sets the annual budget and expenditures of the US Department of Defense, and it has passed Congress every year for 61 years in a row. This year, the NDAA provides $45 billion more for the DoD than called for in Biden’s budget, allocating a whopping $817 billion to the department.
We have to ask our lawmakers: how can we possibly justify allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to the Department of Defense when they can’t even get their books straight and tell us where the money is going? Any politician that votes in favor of the NDAA and then tells you that we just don’t have the money to make sure that kids in America don’t suffer in poverty is lying.
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