DoD doesn't use the resources it receives wisely. Therefore, it should receive fewer resources.
Unfortunately, what will happen instead is that DoD will only buy from giant firms on an "approved" list, which is exactly what those giant firms have paid their lobbyists to bring about.
It appears to be effectively impossible to even audit the Pentagon. When they tried, it cost $400M and less than 25% if the sub-audits received passing grades.
"The Pentagon’s first-ever audit discovered major flaws in how it handles IT processes and challenges with its internal tracking databases, but did not discover any major cases of fraud or abuse."
The $400M covers 2.7T of assets, and, as the article lists, is less than 1/30th of one percent of the budget audited.
So it's not as inefficient an audit as listing a number without context implies.
Again, I chose that article because it is about the best possible lipstick that can be put on that pig.
The audit was a farce. From another article,
"In fiscal year 2015, for example, Congress appropriated $122 billion for the US Army. Yet DoD financial records for the Army’s 2015 budget included a whopping $6.5 trillion (yes, trillion) in plugs. Most of these plugs “lack[ed] supporting documentation, [...]”
“Because of the plugs, there is no auditable way to track Pentagon funding and spending,” explains Asif Khan of the Government Accountability Office"
I'd believe the former article, since the quote you posted from the latter is far beyond any yearly budget even mathematically possible.
You quoted "Yet DoD financial records for the Army’s 2015 budget included a whopping $6.5 trillion (yes, trillion) in plugs."
The entire US annual federal budget is on order of 4 trillion. So that number alone is fearmongering. Total DoD annual budget is around $700B. Army is a fraction of that. A significant amount of the money is simply paying the 2.8 million DoD employees, another decent portion is benefits to retirees, another is equipment maintenance and purchases , and none of these are places you can simply lose all or much of the money - employees notice when they don't get paychecks.
So the 6.5 trillion in a single year plugs is either nonsense or seriously misreported in the latter article.
Another way to see it - the article says Congress allocated $122B on 2015 for Army. At that rate Army would take 60+ years to have 6.5T in funny money floating around, and that only if it was not paying anyone for anything else, and that requires them to get 122B a year for the past 60 years, which they did not (60 years ago total DoD budget budget was ~50B, Army was a small fraction of that).
Thus it's easy to see the article is some mix of lying, ignorance, miscounting, multiple counting, or other nonsense. It's mathematically impossible for Army to have misplaced or hidden or defrauded that much money.
Care to explain their math while tying it down to actual budget numbers?
> Thus it's easy to see the article is some mix of lying, ignorance, miscounting, multiple counting, or other nonsense
This reminds me of an economics joke.
A professor and a student are walking across campus. The student points to the ground and says, "Look! a $20 bill!" Without looking, the professor says, "Nonsense! If there were, someone would have picked it up."
> Care to explain their math while tying it down to actual budget numbers?
Since you don't seem to sully your assumptions with facts, no, I don't care to. You can stop reading here and just keep on being right all the time.
If anyone reading along is confused, here's some copy-paste from the article that could have saved the parent poster time and mockery:
Among the laundering tactics the Pentagon uses: So-called “one-year money”—funds that Congress intends to be spent in a single fiscal year—gets shifted into a pool of five-year money. This maneuver exploits the fact that federal law does not require the return of unspent “five-year money” during that five-year allocation period.
The phony numbers are referred to inside the Pentagon as “plugs,” as in plugging a hole, said current and former officials. “Nippering,” a reference to a sharp-nosed tool used to snip off bits of wire or metal, is Pentagon slang for shifting money from its congressionally authorized purpose to a different purpose. Such nippering can be repeated multiple times “until the funds become virtually untraceable,” says one Pentagon-budgeting veteran who insisted on anonymity in order to keep his job as a lobbyist at the Pentagon."
[...] In other words, there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent. Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion had been “removed,” the inspector general’s office reported.
Again, this implies that Army spent 6.5 trillion, and I quote "there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent".
Army has received far less than that in total money in their entire history, which is very easy to check.
So which is incorrect? The article? Or every other place you can check historical US federal budgets?
>no, I don't care to.
I suspected as much. It's trivial to check this number is nonsense.
If you will believe DoD, and we'll understand if you won't, you'll find the $6.5T figure on page "i" of this document. [0] (click through soon, because they take down these embarrassing reports all the time!) Of course the gigantic figure is nonsense, but that indicts DoD accounting rather than the journalists who've noticed its shabby nature. By producing meaningless numbers, the accountants have completely obscured what's really going on, in violation of Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution.
And here is the same audit done in 2018, again from the Inspector General (your report was 2016). It's the most recent followup to your report, which is now outdated.
Seems the 6.5T must have evaporated. As expected.
This is why using simple smell tests to raise suspicion is worth noting.
Just look at the first page of each document. The one I linked clearly states on page "i" both an Objective and a Finding ("did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter journal voucher (JV) adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend"). Your document neither addresses this issue nor does it include any stated objective nor does it include any stated findings. No one who even skimmed this document would suspect it even addresses this topic. We can't just assume, as you would like to do, that a massive problem of long standing would just disappear in a couple of years. No one thinks that the Pentagon stole $6.5T in one year. The fact that the $6.5T figure appears anywhere on Pentagon account books is the problem. When "adjustments" with no reasonable explanation overwhelm real assets and transactions, the accounts are without meaning. In such a situation, we can be sure that lots of resources are being diverted to unapproved purposes, even if those diversions don't tally to the trillions. (Although, when the budget is 3/4 of a trillion per year, it's not going to take long to get there.)
Frankly you seem to be arguing with straw men. Why is that? Do you have any professional experience with accounting? Have you ever produced a balance sheet? Have you ever read one?
>The fact that the $6.5T figure appears anywhere on Pentagon account books is the problem
It doesn't as I linked. It's derived from a (quote) "non-statistical sample" and is full of double billing. I pointed this out with sources. This number is not from tallying items on books - it's from taking not statistically controlled sample and extrapolating, using poor methodology (as pointed out in the links I provided). This is basic stats and arithmetic.
When X money comes from gov to dept A, goes on a book, then goes to dept B, goes on a book, this is not 2X dollars. This is how they get such ridiculous numbers by not balancing books. This is pointed out in enough well sources internet places besides what I posted that it's not worth digging it up more.
Coincidentally, the DoD recently completed it's second complete audit [1] in late 2019, even later than the 2018 one I posted above. Again, they found "No evidence of fraud". If you search that gov site, you'll find documents in depth about the audit(s).
I get that you want to stick to a clearly incorrect audit from 2016 for your narrative of incompetence and fraud, but when I've provided 2 annual audits that show otherwise, it's clear you're holding onto a belief over fact.
You're linking to press releases now, so this discussion has run its course. You refuse to acknowledge that unjustified adjustments have overwhelmed the rest of the books. Reading the press release, we find it's bragging about a few parts of DoD, not even including USArmy which is what we were talking about.
So your first link in this thread, which is a press release, and your second link, which is a Dave Lindoff opinion piece, are valid, but linking a .gov release with a link to the actual audit means this thread has run it's course? That's intellectually dishonest.
>not even including USArmy which is what we were talking about.
The linked audit clearly states Army. Look at the audit page. Search the word "Army". First (and only) Army link goes to the Army section of the audit. Since you didn't even look, I'll post the Army section for you [1].
This has become completely dishonest. You're not even looking at the audits from the DoD, including the one you care about, to update your world view.
>You refuse to acknowledge that unjustified adjustments have overwhelmed the rest of the books.
I admit they did in 2016. The 2018 and 2019 audits no longer have that result. Do you acknowledge subsequent audits resolved the discrepancies and found no evidence of fraud?
I'm guessing those were positive and negative fudge factors. Most cancelled out, but the end result is the footnote level corrections are larger in absolute magnitude than the underlying budget, making it very difficult to parse (imagine if you had so much monkey patching nothing of the original code base remained).
Unfortunately, what will happen instead is that DoD will only buy from giant firms on an "approved" list, which is exactly what those giant firms have paid their lobbyists to bring about.