Every year that members of Congress vote for budget boosts to this agency with no strings attached, they choose to spend untold billions on war with no accountability.
Originally in National Priorities Project
The Pentagon has failed its audit, again. For the sixth time in a row. The agency that accounts for half of the federal discretionary budget does not know what it did with the money.
For a brief recap, the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Until 2018, it had never even completed an audit. Since then, the Pentagon has completed an audit every year (and given itself a participation prize each time, this year with a press release titled “DOD Makes Incremental Progress Towards Clean Audit”). It has failed every time.
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 (the last agency to pass an audit previously was the Department of Homeland Security, which passed its first audit in 2013).
Congress is poised to give a budget upward of $840 billion to the agency despite its failures:
Since the Pentagon’s first failed audit in 2018, Congress has approved and the president has signed into law $3.9 trillion in Pentagon spending* – knowing that those funds may never be accounted for.
In its most recent audit, the Pentagon was able to account for just 50 percent of its $3.8 trillion in assets (including equipment, facilities, etc). That means $1.9 trillion is unaccounted for – more than the entire federal discretionary budget.
Each year, half of the Pentagon budget goes to corporate weapons contractors and other corporations who profiteer from this lack of accountability.
Even while the Pentagon failed audit after audit, tens of billions of dollars 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.
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 for budget boosts to this agency with no strings attached, they choose to spend untold billions on war with no accountability.
Federal discretionary budget authority for the Department of Defense for FY19-FY23 according to NPP calculations and the Office of Management and Budget.
read more: https://ips-dc.org/pentagon-fails-its-sixth-audit/
NEWS FLASH: One of the, if not the, mostly wildly complex organizations on Earth can’t account for every penny spent. And never has.
No shit? If they somehow passed, I’d call bullshit.
It’s going to take heavy lifting to get military waste under control. Bringing all these disparate accounting systems together, systems whose ages are measured in decades, is mind boggling. The costs, both financial and political, will be stupendous, and the timeline is measured in decades, but it has to get done.
And while everyone, including me, decries military waste, I’ll remind you that “waste” is funding American payrolls. The positive economic “blast radius” of a military base is ~100 miles.
Tiny example; Print shop I managed made fat stacks running military blueprints (“as-builts”) on expensive, indestructible, plastic media. We want to cut the regulation that requires that? I’d just as soon the military have offline, non-degradable blueprints in the event hell breaks loose. Wouldn’t you?
And speaking of hell breaking loose, I didn’t see anyone whining when the Florida Guard and US Army came to save our civilian asses after Hurricane Ivan. Don’t see anyone complaining that we can go run around the largest military base in the world for $20/yr. Camping, hunting, hiking, kayaking, all that. How about all the museums like NAS Pensacola? We’re still cool with free museums, aren’t we?
tl;dr: Getting the spend under control is literally the most complex task I know of. Also, the US military has shitloads of responsibilities outside of shooting people.
IDK, only being able to account for 50% of your assets is pretty terrible, and that doesn’t matter if you’re a million dollar entity or a trillion+ dollar one.
The procedure here should be pretty simple: require everyone below you to pass an audit, combine that with your financial data, then submit that to superiors. If each department passes independently, the org will pass. If massive, trillion dollar companies like Apple and Microsoft can figure it out, surely the Pentagon can.
Yes, it’s a large, complex organization, but large, complex organizations are made out of smaller, similar pieces that can be individually audited. Surely the organization coordinating global military operations can manage to coordinate a financial audit… Logistics is kind of their thing.
An audit isn’t about controlling spend, it’s about correctly reporting it. If they can’t get that right, what hope do we have of figuring out where the waste is going?
I’ve got two pretty radical, but easy to incrementally adapt ideas that would cut some of the most ridiculous waste examples floating out there, and cause a new kind that isn’t nearly such a big problem, but might face political issues (like it did decades ago).
First: prescribe milspec requirements in terms of functional requirements, not specific materials or technologies, unless absolutely necessary. This is responsible for most of the things like $1000 toilet seats - Home Depot sells a perfectly useful toilet seat for $35, but the order form doesn’t say “We would like 10 perfectly useful toilet seats”, instead it says (I don’t remember the details but) “We would like 10 toilet seats made exactly the way they were in the 1970s, out of 1970s plastic, with a 1970s shape. They must be brand new.” So instead of popping over to Home Depot for a couple hundred bucks, some company has to make weird toilet seats out of weird stuff, and it’s a lot more time consuming and difficult.
Second, default to firm fixed price contracts for most purposes. T&E contracts might have their place, but with only very slight incentive not to produce bad estimates, contractors are producing really bad estimates. There’s also a huge amount of “Do it the worst way” in some programs, because you make More money by spending more time on tasks, and are directly punished for novel and more efficient work. I worked briefly with a Windows sysadmin paid by the government. He was supposed to set up a connection between a Windows server and a system I was responsible for. I googled how to do my end of the connection, and had it listening in a couple hours. He pulled out printed reference documentation, found the right chapters in the index, and spent 4 days reading before he “could” establish the connection.
The “problem” with firm fixed price is that if someone discovers a very efficient way to do something, they can make a ton of money. For example, if the army is buying tanks, and the going rate is $20 million, and some contractor comes up with a way to make a tank for $1 million, they’ll bid $19 million, make them for $1 million, and pocket a cool 95% profit. This looks bad, despite everyone being better off. The army gets a cheaper tank, so the taxpayer is out less money, and the inventive company makes a bunch of money. Gradually other companies will work out ways to compete, and the price will fall until profits are less extreme. Politicians will get questions about it, though, so it will probably never happen.
To be clear though it’s not like the alternative is that the money would be burned. It could go to Healthcare, infrastructure, education. All things some may consider more important than a single print shop making “fat stacks”