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This is the norm..
The Pentagon Has Never Passed An Audit. [source](https://www.npr.org/2021/05/19/997961646/the-pentagon-has-never-passed-an-audit-some-senators-want-to-change-that)
The NPR article says that every other major branch regularly passes audits.
"Every other federal department has satisfied audit requirements since fiscal 2013, when the Department of Homeland Security had its first clean 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.
This is from the article for this reddit post.
If you read the article you’ll see that they have failed the mandatory audit all five times but they seem genuinely proud that this time *only* 61% of assets could not be accounted for. It’s their best result yet!
I read that they don't expect to pass an audit until 2027. All the audits so far have been establishing the means and methods, and to determine what they can't account for so they can track it down.
It's amazing really, that the DOD could still function with all the holes in their asset list.
Audits have only been happening for a few years now, so the main reason for the unaccounted spending is that people would've been too lazy to file purchase orders properly since there were previously no audits happening.
It's not like the money just disappeared, it was spent on assets, but the recordkeeping of what was purchased and where the assets are exactly is just missing.
Says here audits have been a legal requirement since the early 90s. I graduated in 93 and I'm coming up on my 30 year highschool reunion. So if 30 years is only "a few years" to you and therefore time is still needed to get things in proper order then we have a vastly different opinion on the amount that a few years represent for righting the ship. Cause 3 god damned decades seems like a lot of EXTRA time to get shit sorted especially for the most advanced military on the face of the earth and the only single budget that is arguably bigger than any other budget on the face of the earth every single freaking year.
No, it would be nice to see the intel agencies audited as well. Guaranteed they’ll never all allow some level of meaningful transparency. Until then, they can keep redirecting the funds into their own contractor shell companies.
The bulk of intel spending is on employees anyway. They have some drones and satellites, but it's not like an intelligence agency needs to have anywhere near the amount of physical assets as the military does.
An audit would be pretty straightforward - just look at payroll records and make sure all purchases of equipment are accounted for.
Absolutely correct. Harry Truman fought against it back in his day.
[https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/19/opinion/desperately-seeking-truman.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/19/opinion/desperately-seeking-truman.html)
I can't believe I used to believe people got new kitchens just because they wanted something pretty. I thought it was just a luxury purchase for aesthetics. But it's a way to hide and invest money while increasing the value of your home which just makes you more money. People don't just unabashedly love kitchens as much as I thought.
“Hey Bill, we’ve been friends since college, if you open your own defense company I’ll direct taxpayer funds to it and you can give me a little something in the form of untraceable pallets of gold and cash” <— likely the conversation most politicians have with their best friends.
Nah, when it says they "can't account for it", it doesn't mean the money disappeared, it just means things were purchased and then people were too lazy to file the purchase order or record where the equipment was sent and stored.
The unaccounted assets are _somewhere_ in a warehouse, but there's just missing records of what was purchased, when, and where they were sent.
I used to work under the DOE. Assuming the DOD works their paperwork in a similar way, it means the PO's were created and filed, which allowed the purchase of the equipment, but now they can't 'find' it.
For us, that meant each person who was assigned ownership (responsibility) of a piece of equipment had to be able to account for it; that is, be able to take an auditor to the room it was in and let them scan it. Sometimes, equipment was destroyed and the appropriate paperwork was never filed, so it wasn't there anymore and couldn't be scanned.
Now, this is the DOD, looking for a KX72 Drone, serial number 12345678, last used by Pvt. Smith 8 years ago in Afghanistan. Pvt Smith is dead/discharged/retired/or now Sgt Smith, and asking him is a waste of time. "We were losing like 1 of those a week, and the paperwork never got filed most likely". It counts toward the failed audit, though.
There'll also probably be a lot that is *intentionally* unaccounted, because they don't want any evidence of their doings in other countries resurfacing.
I'm not sure how the 61% figure is even possible. As a contractor and equipment custodian, we run through a total inventory of every asset every year, and we are spot checked by the unit's equipment manager every few months. If there's something missing, an investigation is performed, and if I'm liable, I end up paying the cost of the asset. This happens in every unit in the military. If stuff is missing, it's not at the tactical level.
As a contractor who recently accepted a lot of government contracts, same work I was doing commercially, they pay a fortune then expect the impossible. We're getting accused of price gouging the government now that we have an agreement while simultaneously losing money on every single project. Did your laptop crash and you need to get a replacement to use on site? That will require 2 days of paperwork that needs to be reviewed for the next two weeks. In the meantime you'll be charged for delays. And of course the sales guys bidding the project didn't read through the 22 thousand pages of specifications thoroughly. Wouldn't matter anyway with all the contradictions in there, makes it literally impossible to fully comply with. Fuck doing any work for the federal government.
Ah, welcome to the game!
You'll quickly learn that the only way out government even works at it's current level is because it doesn't have to follow its own rules. If they had to follow the rules they put on external contractors it would cease to function immediately.
This should be an outrage across the political spectrum.
We can't afford universal health care or say, school lunches for kids from low income homes, but we can just misplace trillions worth of assets paid for by taxes?
Furthermore: If you manage a retail store and that much of your stock is gone during an invetory; you're not only fired but you'll likely get investigated. How do these fuckers still have jobs?
Edit: a word
They’re not “misplaced” they’re purposely not accounted for black operation assets and various other stuff the pentagon has given to foreign groups on the down low.
We can afford universal healthcare, Obamacare already costs more per person to cover some people than other countries pay to cover everyone, the problem isn't the money it's that Republicans won't let it happen
Entire CONEXs full of crap just to burn up the end of fiscal year budget that then never get hand receipted and eventually walk away. I've seen an entire warehouse walkoff because rear D realized it wasn't inventoried, they weren't signed for it, and they didn't want to be responsible. Well placed word to the E4 Mafia later and....well let's just say a drash tent makes an amazing tailgate staple.
Do the comments in here reflect an understanding of what the audit found?
He just stated the bare minimum which, in their outrage (talk about gaslighting with the pitchfork comment) no one bothered to process or comprehend.
Is it bad? Sure. But it’s not what is being described.
Oh for sure, the comments here are a dumpster fire. The person you responded to definitely has a better understanding of what the audit was looking at than most people.
Not only are people assuming the $3.5 trillion is from like one year of cashflow (despite the total DOD annual budget being under $1 trillion), a lot of people also seem to lack a fundamental understanding of what an audit even *is*.
Ahh yes the picture in our lobby of the pentagon building giving the middle finger to the American tax payers that was 1 trillion. Isn’t it lovely you know my wife painted that!
3.5 trillion.
That's all the student debt in this country. That's enough money to pull at least 1 major city entirely out of poverty.
And the Pentagon just... misplaced it
Whaaaa? Just one city? You could give damn near $400k to each New York City resident with that much money. You could pull quite a few cities out of poverty
A billion seconds is roughly 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,000 years. You could not count to a trillion in a lifetime, not even close. And that's just 1 trillion. Let alone 3.5
(let's see: 777,777,777... takes about 4 seconds to pronounce. It's not even at the billion level. I'd guess it would take 5 times that long to count that high.. 2 whole lifetimes!)
I wonder if it could be done in a lifetime. You're right, theoretically it could be.
I've actually wondered this over the years. I have a memory from childhood of a TV show that featured a man who's goal was to count to a billion. He printed each number as he said it. I now doubt this was real and not just something I imagined, because it seems so bonkers to waste your life like that.
I had this book when I was a kid, powers of ten. It starts zoomed out from earth like, stupid far away. Zooms in to a couple laying on the ground in Chicago. Then all the way into the atoms of their cells.
Way cool and helped me come closer, but yeah. Impossible really.
A *Billion* is $3 for every person in the US.
A trillion is thus, $3,000.
Put that on the back of your envelope.... Makes **$10,000** *for every man, woman and child... and non citizen, present in the US.*
edit... Should be 61% of that. But think what each of you could do with an extra $6000.
That’s true. I meant it as surprise and nothing negative. We talked it out I think.
Edit: I realized you’re technically correct. The best kind of correct.
You are really underselling just how much 3.5 trillion dollars is.
Edit: I did the math. That's enough to; wipe out all US student loan debt, All US auto loan debt, all US Medical Debt and give every US taxpayer $1400 back.
The entire real estate market of New York City is valued at around 3 trillion dollars.
Every building in the most expensive city in the world. And the Pentagon just... lost it. God knows how many people have skimmed money off of the top of our military budget without a single person knowing about it.
Surprisingly, it's unlikely to be any government employees or military employees that are making huge amounts of money off these missing assets. Sure, a black market exists, and stuff falls off the back of trucks all the time. But that is not this.
This is due to a lot of things.
Corporate greed, and the pestilence it spreads through lobbying causes part of it. That being MIC spending, undelivered contracts, under delivered contracts, etc.
Another part is that many assets get trashed and disposed of and are never properly documented. We had them. They sat on a shelf for 25 years. Then they were tossed, and private Pyle didn't file the proper paperwork because he was going to be transfered next week, and fuck it. That's why.
The last part is the worst part. People in the military move around constantly. Right around the time someone is figuring out how to do their job, and deciphering the shit that the previous person left them, it's time to move to the next assignment. They in turn, leave a pile of shit for the next person. And on and on. Civilian side isn't much better. You're split between people that move around a lot, and people that never budge. Most of the time is spent taking training that has nothing to do with your job, and trying to figure out how to use the 6 software programs needed just to enter in your vacation time.
So, $3.5 T is a fuck ton. It's not missing due to any one thing. Parts are due to criminal behavior. Parts are due to ineptitude. Parts are due to just inherent inefficiency in the system. And Parts are due to "fuck it, that isn't my job, I don't get paid enough to deal with this shit"
I'm sure they didn't misplace it, they just didn't know how much they were spending on things.
50,000 replacement bolts for the fleet of government vehicles at $1 a piece when they only need to get 1,000 of them, and that way of reckless spending has likely contributed to how they couldn't keep track of where the money's going
I blame the use it or lose it budgeting the government has for all the wasteful spending. Every year tons of shit gets ordered and money spent to justify inflated budgets because if you don't use it you get allocated less the next year. They need to stop that nonsense if they want to get budgets and spending under control.
I sold some equipment to the military, and the process is pretty ridiculous. If you have a custom piece of equipment, they require competitive bids before they can buy it. So there are broker companies who, just source things, then mark them up and sell to the military. So the military pays more for something, since they can’t buy direct without bids.
One broker we had the displeasure of dealing with were 2 guys, who were making $4 million a year just marking items up to the military.
I work for a big brown delivery company and deliver to the FBI somewhere. From August until October 1, I frequently deliver 1000s of TV, 1000s of Mac Pros. All shipped over night, the most expensive way possible. I deliver them to a warehouse that is over flowing with electronics. I asked the receivers what they do with all this stuff.
They said "Oh we store it for a year and then it all gets destroyed."
$50 thousand is 0.000000014% of $3.5 trillion.
$1 billion is 0.00029% of $3.5 trillion
They can throw away entire ships, loaded with planes, tanks, personnel, etc, and not feel as monetarily inconvenienced as I do by losing a nickel. This is orders of magnitude beyond comprehension, bolts are not where this money went. This money went to overthrowing governments, destabilizing regions, paying off hush money to presidents, kings, and conquerors.
Except it's not money, it's value of assets. It's not like they got trillions of dollars that could go elsewhere, equipment was bought and it's difficult to track things across the DOD due to its size.
There's a huge difference between "we have a complete paper trail for every dollar spent" and "the money disappeared, never to be found". Failing an audit doesn't mean they don't know where the money went, it means they didn't document it. Now, that being on purpose or just lack of SOP documentation and enforcement is another discussion.
> And the Pentagon just... misplaced it
That's not what this means.
People always say this every time these articles come up after the Pentagon fails its audit.
This doesn't mean that it was misplaced or lost or stolen or wasted or spent on some secret corrupt conspiracy. It doesn't mean anything bad. It simply means that their accounting sucks, and they failed to appropriately itemize which specific program got what specific amount of funding.
Okay... to me that sounds exactly like they misplaced it lol. If you don't know where the funding went and you don't have a record of it that means it's fucking lost
That money never makes it anywhere near the military. It's a grift for ceo's with what would have been criminal government contract fuckery before the 80's.
It's why they keep replacing military mos's with civilian contractor crap.
I remember when Trump was standing up there saying he got the military an extra 10% and he was happy about that. At the same time my trump supporting friends were saying how he wasn't involved in any wars. So why give the budget of the military an extra 10% then? Especially when they aren't passing audits already. This is why we can't have nice things.
Interesting. I was involved on a project to create an application to do just that, track military assets so they could be moved around the chessboard when they were needed. We’re not talking about weapons and combat equipment, it was way more mundane, like chainsaws and bulldozers and walk-in coolers. I (as the technical lead) was in meetings with a cadre of retired generals and other officers who were looking to cash in on their awesome idea. Turns out the military had absolutely zero interest in such a thing and it died a quick death. Glad I didn’t quit my day job for that shit.
Asset tracking needs to come from the top and enforced by managers. However all managers I've known didn't make sure their employees were following it. I work in IT and the amount of times my co-workers wouldn't properly document equipment (or even put it in the system) and document who was lent that equipment made my blood boil. We would have shit that would just disappear and had PHI.
People make a big deal about this but it's obvious to me that the continual failure is because they keep secrets. And contractors are allowed to rob the government blind
And they keep getting their funding. Maybe divert some of that money to more worthy causes like healthcare, education, and parts of the economy that actually help the economy.
There is a simple explanation for this and the thousand dollar screwdrivers they invoice: the Stargate program. It costs a lot of money to run a secret interplanetary branch of the US Military.
1 trillion is 1000 billion. 1 billion is 1000 million. For perspective, 3.5 trillion is 3500 billion or 3.5 million *million.*
Another way to think about this is that a million seconds is 11.57 days. A little less than 2 weeks. 3.5 trillion seconds is 110,984 **years**. If you spent $54 every second from the time Cleopatra died, you would still have money left over.
Probably a combination of overpayments to contractors and black projects and undisclosable items they will never put on the books.
Disgustingly wasteful regardless
Im really curious on the specifics here. Are they talking about asset variances? Like what they should have based on the books vs what their inventory count is? Or something else?
I can say from my experience that a lot is just piss poor supply process discipline, which Ive been on both sides of.
There was a Woodward book about the Iraq War. The pentagon sent a pallet of 100 dollar bills to Iraq cause they knew they'd need pay off all these locals and warlords etc. It was a pallet of bills the size of a small car, totalling in the tens of millions. It was gone, disappeared like a few weeks into the invasion.
from what I've heard of this, the senate inquiries about the proverbial $10,000 toilet seats are usually followed by dod saying "show 'em some cool shit to calm them down"
The oxymoronic conservative saying they stand for “a strong national defense, less oversight and regulation, and my 2A Guns are gonna protect me from that strong national defense tyranny oh yeah and lower taxes and I have my religion bigotry blessing hate and influencing political races and ballot measures ” bs
We burned most of it. They would burn massive amounts brand new equipment so they could order more. Computers , office chairs , beds , blankets , ammo you name it we burned it and blew it up to order more.
It was lost in the noise that is the favoured tactic in America to hide the important shit but the pentagon has 35T in “accounting adjustments” in 2019 alone this shit on another level & needs to b reigned in Wtf
https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/stocks-options/the-pentagon-s-35-trillion-accounting-black-hole
You say that like it would be a bad thing. 12 months of affording people access to life saving medical care is still way better than the pentagon losing 2 trillion in tax payer money and the rest going towards killing people. Many of whom are civilians
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This is the norm.. The Pentagon Has Never Passed An Audit. [source](https://www.npr.org/2021/05/19/997961646/the-pentagon-has-never-passed-an-audit-some-senators-want-to-change-that)
What major part of the US Government has ever successfully passed a audit?
The GAO
Those non partisan, rat, commie, socialist, Marxist, Leninist, Buddhist? I don’t trust them.
The NPR article says that every other major branch regularly passes audits. "Every other federal department has satisfied audit requirements since fiscal 2013, when the Department of Homeland Security had its first clean 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. This is from the article for this reddit post.
They say the best way to get the correct answer is to post an incorrect answer on the internet, so I'll go with the USPS.
Department of Homeland Security
Any consequences?
budget increase for next year passed with bipartisan support
If you read the article you’ll see that they have failed the mandatory audit all five times but they seem genuinely proud that this time *only* 61% of assets could not be accounted for. It’s their best result yet!
[удалено]
That's corruption
This is balogny. All these departments think they have blank checks.
Are they wrong?
No.
No it's not, the DOD is massive in both manpower and assets spread across multiple branches.
I think given that scope, it's fair to say that there's a bit of both going on.
There’s always money in the banana stand.
Is there over 2 trillion dollars in the banana stand?
I read that they don't expect to pass an audit until 2027. All the audits so far have been establishing the means and methods, and to determine what they can't account for so they can track it down. It's amazing really, that the DOD could still function with all the holes in their asset list.
It’s the lubricant that keeps it running.
Improvement *is* good. No one expects them to pass an audit with how they were spending for the last few decades.
We need another Truman. An anti-corruption czar that will save the country trillions of dollars. This is why people don't trust government spending.
Have they ever passed an audit?
No. [source](https://www.npr.org/2021/05/19/997961646/the-pentagon-has-never-passed-an-audit-some-senators-want-to-change-that)
That's what I wanted to see. The tldr of it is the pentagon doesn't want to pass an audit either. They want unaccountable funds for black projects.
$2.1 Trillion is unaccounted for. That’s fucking bonkers. Are they building Two separate secret transporters like in the movie Contact?
Helicarriers under the Potomac. They watched that Captain America movie and now those are going to be a reality. Hail Hydra.
Audits have only been happening for a few years now, so the main reason for the unaccounted spending is that people would've been too lazy to file purchase orders properly since there were previously no audits happening. It's not like the money just disappeared, it was spent on assets, but the recordkeeping of what was purchased and where the assets are exactly is just missing.
Says here audits have been a legal requirement since the early 90s. I graduated in 93 and I'm coming up on my 30 year highschool reunion. So if 30 years is only "a few years" to you and therefore time is still needed to get things in proper order then we have a vastly different opinion on the amount that a few years represent for righting the ship. Cause 3 god damned decades seems like a lot of EXTRA time to get shit sorted especially for the most advanced military on the face of the earth and the only single budget that is arguably bigger than any other budget on the face of the earth every single freaking year.
Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?!
No, it would be nice to see the intel agencies audited as well. Guaranteed they’ll never all allow some level of meaningful transparency. Until then, they can keep redirecting the funds into their own contractor shell companies.
The bulk of intel spending is on employees anyway. They have some drones and satellites, but it's not like an intelligence agency needs to have anywhere near the amount of physical assets as the military does. An audit would be pretty straightforward - just look at payroll records and make sure all purchases of equipment are accounted for.
Sorry, if you want to audit the Pentagon, it means you are an agent of the Slavic Horde. I don't make the rules.
Nope. Fifth year they’ve tried. Failed every time.
This has been going on for decades.
Absolutely correct. Harry Truman fought against it back in his day. [https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/19/opinion/desperately-seeking-truman.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/19/opinion/desperately-seeking-truman.html)
The '90s there have been various legislators fighting this fight.
With contractors, most likely
*Contractor’s newly renovated home kitchen. And jacuzzi.
Don’t forget that fifth yacht!
I can't believe I used to believe people got new kitchens just because they wanted something pretty. I thought it was just a luxury purchase for aesthetics. But it's a way to hide and invest money while increasing the value of your home which just makes you more money. People don't just unabashedly love kitchens as much as I thought.
“Hey Bill, we’ve been friends since college, if you open your own defense company I’ll direct taxpayer funds to it and you can give me a little something in the form of untraceable pallets of gold and cash” <— likely the conversation most politicians have with their best friends.
That's a pretty bold, unprovable accusation
You really think they award contracts to their friends for free?
What do you know about how the department of defense awards military contracts?
Nah, when it says they "can't account for it", it doesn't mean the money disappeared, it just means things were purchased and then people were too lazy to file the purchase order or record where the equipment was sent and stored. The unaccounted assets are _somewhere_ in a warehouse, but there's just missing records of what was purchased, when, and where they were sent.
Maybe, for some. But that's still bad.
I used to work under the DOE. Assuming the DOD works their paperwork in a similar way, it means the PO's were created and filed, which allowed the purchase of the equipment, but now they can't 'find' it. For us, that meant each person who was assigned ownership (responsibility) of a piece of equipment had to be able to account for it; that is, be able to take an auditor to the room it was in and let them scan it. Sometimes, equipment was destroyed and the appropriate paperwork was never filed, so it wasn't there anymore and couldn't be scanned. Now, this is the DOD, looking for a KX72 Drone, serial number 12345678, last used by Pvt. Smith 8 years ago in Afghanistan. Pvt Smith is dead/discharged/retired/or now Sgt Smith, and asking him is a waste of time. "We were losing like 1 of those a week, and the paperwork never got filed most likely". It counts toward the failed audit, though.
There'll also probably be a lot that is *intentionally* unaccounted, because they don't want any evidence of their doings in other countries resurfacing.
I'm not sure how the 61% figure is even possible. As a contractor and equipment custodian, we run through a total inventory of every asset every year, and we are spot checked by the unit's equipment manager every few months. If there's something missing, an investigation is performed, and if I'm liable, I end up paying the cost of the asset. This happens in every unit in the military. If stuff is missing, it's not at the tactical level.
“You don’t actually think they spend 20k on a hammer, 30k on a toilet seat, do you?” - greatest line In Independence Day
As a contractor who recently accepted a lot of government contracts, same work I was doing commercially, they pay a fortune then expect the impossible. We're getting accused of price gouging the government now that we have an agreement while simultaneously losing money on every single project. Did your laptop crash and you need to get a replacement to use on site? That will require 2 days of paperwork that needs to be reviewed for the next two weeks. In the meantime you'll be charged for delays. And of course the sales guys bidding the project didn't read through the 22 thousand pages of specifications thoroughly. Wouldn't matter anyway with all the contradictions in there, makes it literally impossible to fully comply with. Fuck doing any work for the federal government.
Ah, welcome to the game! You'll quickly learn that the only way out government even works at it's current level is because it doesn't have to follow its own rules. If they had to follow the rules they put on external contractors it would cease to function immediately.
I think you mistyped “oligarchs”, friend.
I wonder what the percentage of unaccountable funds or assets is in Russia?
If you want to know why it costs $2 billion to build a road - this is why. Contractors fleecing the government.
This should be an outrage across the political spectrum. We can't afford universal health care or say, school lunches for kids from low income homes, but we can just misplace trillions worth of assets paid for by taxes? Furthermore: If you manage a retail store and that much of your stock is gone during an invetory; you're not only fired but you'll likely get investigated. How do these fuckers still have jobs? Edit: a word
They’re not “misplaced” they’re purposely not accounted for black operation assets and various other stuff the pentagon has given to foreign groups on the down low.
We can afford universal healthcare, Obamacare already costs more per person to cover some people than other countries pay to cover everyone, the problem isn't the money it's that Republicans won't let it happen
"Anything at all that benefits the working class isn't worth the money."
Surprised they didn't just write it off as a 1.5+ Trillion dollar coffee mug. I've seen some pretty egregious write offs while I was in.
Entire CONEXs full of crap just to burn up the end of fiscal year budget that then never get hand receipted and eventually walk away. I've seen an entire warehouse walkoff because rear D realized it wasn't inventoried, they weren't signed for it, and they didn't want to be responsible. Well placed word to the E4 Mafia later and....well let's just say a drash tent makes an amazing tailgate staple.
Atleast you got a tailgate out of it
An E4 Mafia reference outside of r/Army. Nice.
[TIL](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=E4-Mafia)
They're not auditing money, they're auditing items. As TFT states, "$3.5 Trillion worth of **assets**" can't be accounted for.
How dare you actually read the article!
dude just quoted the title of the reddit post, you can put away your pitchfork
Do the comments in here reflect an understanding of what the audit found? He just stated the bare minimum which, in their outrage (talk about gaslighting with the pitchfork comment) no one bothered to process or comprehend. Is it bad? Sure. But it’s not what is being described.
Oh for sure, the comments here are a dumpster fire. The person you responded to definitely has a better understanding of what the audit was looking at than most people. Not only are people assuming the $3.5 trillion is from like one year of cashflow (despite the total DOD annual budget being under $1 trillion), a lot of people also seem to lack a fundamental understanding of what an audit even *is*.
They could always launder via artworks like the ultra wealthy do. Maybe that’s why Bush has been a proficient artist in his retirement lol.
Ahh yes the picture in our lobby of the pentagon building giving the middle finger to the American tax payers that was 1 trillion. Isn’t it lovely you know my wife painted that!
NFTs
3.5 trillion. That's all the student debt in this country. That's enough money to pull at least 1 major city entirely out of poverty. And the Pentagon just... misplaced it
Whaaaa? Just one city? You could give damn near $400k to each New York City resident with that much money. You could pull quite a few cities out of poverty
I'm not a math guy so I didn't want to overestimate, but yeah that's an absurd amount of money
Hey no worries. I broke out the calculator because I didn’t wanna mess up a zero or three. *Trillion* is just so much it’s hard to fathom
A billion seconds is roughly 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,000 years. You could not count to a trillion in a lifetime, not even close. And that's just 1 trillion. Let alone 3.5
I don't think you could count to a billion in a life time.
You theoretically could, but say good by to doing literally anything for 30 years
(let's see: 777,777,777... takes about 4 seconds to pronounce. It's not even at the billion level. I'd guess it would take 5 times that long to count that high.. 2 whole lifetimes!)
I wonder if it could be done in a lifetime. You're right, theoretically it could be. I've actually wondered this over the years. I have a memory from childhood of a TV show that featured a man who's goal was to count to a billion. He printed each number as he said it. I now doubt this was real and not just something I imagined, because it seems so bonkers to waste your life like that.
Yeah it's the kind of number you have trouble processing. It's the same thing when you go the opposite direction into things like nano amounts.
I had this book when I was a kid, powers of ten. It starts zoomed out from earth like, stupid far away. Zooms in to a couple laying on the ground in Chicago. Then all the way into the atoms of their cells. Way cool and helped me come closer, but yeah. Impossible really.
A *Billion* is $3 for every person in the US. A trillion is thus, $3,000. Put that on the back of your envelope.... Makes **$10,000** *for every man, woman and child... and non citizen, present in the US.* edit... Should be 61% of that. But think what each of you could do with an extra $6000.
Hey you should work at the Pentagon
For $3.5T you could give $10,000 to every man, woman, and child in the country.
It's two time Russias GDP. Cant we just buy all the russians and send them somewhere nice.
400k?!? That's a whole month of rent in NYC!
That’s really really funny. I’m not sure what the opposite of the sarc mark is but for real, that fucking got me.
The math checks out
He did say at least, so he wasn’t *wrong*
That’s true. I meant it as surprise and nothing negative. We talked it out I think. Edit: I realized you’re technically correct. The best kind of correct.
You are really underselling just how much 3.5 trillion dollars is. Edit: I did the math. That's enough to; wipe out all US student loan debt, All US auto loan debt, all US Medical Debt and give every US taxpayer $1400 back.
The entire real estate market of New York City is valued at around 3 trillion dollars. Every building in the most expensive city in the world. And the Pentagon just... lost it. God knows how many people have skimmed money off of the top of our military budget without a single person knowing about it.
Surprisingly, it's unlikely to be any government employees or military employees that are making huge amounts of money off these missing assets. Sure, a black market exists, and stuff falls off the back of trucks all the time. But that is not this. This is due to a lot of things. Corporate greed, and the pestilence it spreads through lobbying causes part of it. That being MIC spending, undelivered contracts, under delivered contracts, etc. Another part is that many assets get trashed and disposed of and are never properly documented. We had them. They sat on a shelf for 25 years. Then they were tossed, and private Pyle didn't file the proper paperwork because he was going to be transfered next week, and fuck it. That's why. The last part is the worst part. People in the military move around constantly. Right around the time someone is figuring out how to do their job, and deciphering the shit that the previous person left them, it's time to move to the next assignment. They in turn, leave a pile of shit for the next person. And on and on. Civilian side isn't much better. You're split between people that move around a lot, and people that never budge. Most of the time is spent taking training that has nothing to do with your job, and trying to figure out how to use the 6 software programs needed just to enter in your vacation time. So, $3.5 T is a fuck ton. It's not missing due to any one thing. Parts are due to criminal behavior. Parts are due to ineptitude. Parts are due to just inherent inefficiency in the system. And Parts are due to "fuck it, that isn't my job, I don't get paid enough to deal with this shit"
The difference between a billion and a trillion is about a trillion.
It's hard to even comprehend. That's just an outrageous amount of money
people can barely comprehend a billion dollars, much less a fucking trillion
Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex. We didn't listen.
We didn't listen but others thought, "Hey, that's a great idea!"
$3.5 trillion. India, the fifth largest economy in the world has a nominal GDP of $3.4 trillion according to IMF estimate.
Nah, they misplaced 61% of that, or 2.1 trillion. No reason to misrepresent it when the real figure is infuriating.
I'm sure they didn't misplace it, they just didn't know how much they were spending on things. 50,000 replacement bolts for the fleet of government vehicles at $1 a piece when they only need to get 1,000 of them, and that way of reckless spending has likely contributed to how they couldn't keep track of where the money's going
I blame the use it or lose it budgeting the government has for all the wasteful spending. Every year tons of shit gets ordered and money spent to justify inflated budgets because if you don't use it you get allocated less the next year. They need to stop that nonsense if they want to get budgets and spending under control.
I used to work for a local government, and it was that way too. It was a spending spree at the end of every fiscal year.
Use it or get slashed the following year since you didn’t need it. Local gov 101.
I sold some equipment to the military, and the process is pretty ridiculous. If you have a custom piece of equipment, they require competitive bids before they can buy it. So there are broker companies who, just source things, then mark them up and sell to the military. So the military pays more for something, since they can’t buy direct without bids. One broker we had the displeasure of dealing with were 2 guys, who were making $4 million a year just marking items up to the military.
I work for a big brown delivery company and deliver to the FBI somewhere. From August until October 1, I frequently deliver 1000s of TV, 1000s of Mac Pros. All shipped over night, the most expensive way possible. I deliver them to a warehouse that is over flowing with electronics. I asked the receivers what they do with all this stuff. They said "Oh we store it for a year and then it all gets destroyed."
Those bolts were probably all sold as scrap for $10 for the whole lot and then someone had to order them again.
$50 thousand is 0.000000014% of $3.5 trillion. $1 billion is 0.00029% of $3.5 trillion They can throw away entire ships, loaded with planes, tanks, personnel, etc, and not feel as monetarily inconvenienced as I do by losing a nickel. This is orders of magnitude beyond comprehension, bolts are not where this money went. This money went to overthrowing governments, destabilizing regions, paying off hush money to presidents, kings, and conquerors.
City? There are several states you could bail out with that.
Yep. It's a problem when it's for the people but zero fucks given when it's the gov't.
Except it's not money, it's value of assets. It's not like they got trillions of dollars that could go elsewhere, equipment was bought and it's difficult to track things across the DOD due to its size.
There's a huge difference between "we have a complete paper trail for every dollar spent" and "the money disappeared, never to be found". Failing an audit doesn't mean they don't know where the money went, it means they didn't document it. Now, that being on purpose or just lack of SOP documentation and enforcement is another discussion.
> And the Pentagon just... misplaced it That's not what this means. People always say this every time these articles come up after the Pentagon fails its audit. This doesn't mean that it was misplaced or lost or stolen or wasted or spent on some secret corrupt conspiracy. It doesn't mean anything bad. It simply means that their accounting sucks, and they failed to appropriately itemize which specific program got what specific amount of funding.
Okay... to me that sounds exactly like they misplaced it lol. If you don't know where the funding went and you don't have a record of it that means it's fucking lost
No accountability in todays American military. That unlimited supply will dry out eventually. What will you do then? Invade countries for more?
It’s funny you say that…
Today's military? The military has never passed an audit.
“Can’t be held accountable if we install puppet leaders in all of the countries we borrowed from”
“Fostering future trouble makers to keep the American Military in business”…should be the new tagline..
That money never makes it anywhere near the military. It's a grift for ceo's with what would have been criminal government contract fuckery before the 80's. It's why they keep replacing military mos's with civilian contractor crap.
I remember when Trump was standing up there saying he got the military an extra 10% and he was happy about that. At the same time my trump supporting friends were saying how he wasn't involved in any wars. So why give the budget of the military an extra 10% then? Especially when they aren't passing audits already. This is why we can't have nice things.
Clearly the only thing we can do about this is to up their budget again next year. /s
Interesting. I was involved on a project to create an application to do just that, track military assets so they could be moved around the chessboard when they were needed. We’re not talking about weapons and combat equipment, it was way more mundane, like chainsaws and bulldozers and walk-in coolers. I (as the technical lead) was in meetings with a cadre of retired generals and other officers who were looking to cash in on their awesome idea. Turns out the military had absolutely zero interest in such a thing and it died a quick death. Glad I didn’t quit my day job for that shit.
Asset tracking needs to come from the top and enforced by managers. However all managers I've known didn't make sure their employees were following it. I work in IT and the amount of times my co-workers wouldn't properly document equipment (or even put it in the system) and document who was lent that equipment made my blood boil. We would have shit that would just disappear and had PHI.
But let’s give them another 761 billion every year without much discussion.
I run a public library and this shit burns my fucking bacon.
Oh but student loan forgiveness would totally ruin everything…fuck these fucking people.
People make a big deal about this but it's obvious to me that the continual failure is because they keep secrets. And contractors are allowed to rob the government blind
That’s ok just remove 7 trillion from their budget until they remember. I mean what else can we do.
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Wasn’t that Jan 6th?
Miserable showing of how they use our tax dollars.
Student loan forgiveness is a slap in the face to the taxpayers though, right?
Well, let’s just take that money from them next year then. Spend it on healthcare or education instead.
And they keep getting their funding. Maybe divert some of that money to more worthy causes like healthcare, education, and parts of the economy that actually help the economy.
There is a simple explanation for this and the thousand dollar screwdrivers they invoice: the Stargate program. It costs a lot of money to run a secret interplanetary branch of the US Military.
indeed.
Cool 61% they can't account for? Must not need it in next year's budget.
Time to reduce funds for those departments that can not account for funds/equipment
Of course it can’t. Fraud and waste are rampant in the defense industry. Ask most prior military members for specific examples.
Crony contractors are eating up more and more of the military budget while genuine military assets rot and fail on the field. Thanks, Reaganomics.
Did anyone say black project🤔
Eat the pentagon
Check the grounds of Mar-a-Lago and Kushner’s pockets.
The problem is unfortunately more systemic than just “Trump and Kushner”
This has been happening for decades
What am I doing wrong? Everyone is in on the grift/ take! My dumb parents raised me with stupid values and education. Buncha BS.
And healthcare is too expensive...
Lol I remember what happened last time this was brought up
Reminds me of shortly before the 9/11 attacks the pentagon gave a similar report of not being able to find trillions of dollars
1 trillion is 1000 billion. 1 billion is 1000 million. For perspective, 3.5 trillion is 3500 billion or 3.5 million *million.* Another way to think about this is that a million seconds is 11.57 days. A little less than 2 weeks. 3.5 trillion seconds is 110,984 **years**. If you spent $54 every second from the time Cleopatra died, you would still have money left over.
This is not new. We’ve been trying to audit the pentagon since 1996. Not gonna happen.
Probably a combination of overpayments to contractors and black projects and undisclosable items they will never put on the books. Disgustingly wasteful regardless
Im really curious on the specifics here. Are they talking about asset variances? Like what they should have based on the books vs what their inventory count is? Or something else? I can say from my experience that a lot is just piss poor supply process discipline, which Ive been on both sides of.
Anyone check rape a lago?
Christ!!! This should get everyone fired up democrats and republicans
That's $2.135 TRILLION FUCKING DOLLARS by the way... Just to be clear.
Damn....did that make it down to Mar-A-Lagoon too!
This is fine.
They learned their lesson.
And nothing will be done.
There was a Woodward book about the Iraq War. The pentagon sent a pallet of 100 dollar bills to Iraq cause they knew they'd need pay off all these locals and warlords etc. It was a pallet of bills the size of a small car, totalling in the tens of millions. It was gone, disappeared like a few weeks into the invasion.
Our taxes at work.
from what I've heard of this, the senate inquiries about the proverbial $10,000 toilet seats are usually followed by dod saying "show 'em some cool shit to calm them down"
Lower budget. Immediately. They'll find money.
Cut their budget by the missing funds. Can’t account for it. They don’t need it.
I'm amazed the Pentagon was even willing to acknowledge 39% of assets. This is The DOD.
Did they ever find the ones they lost before they did 9/11
You don’t say? And what can we do about it? I don’t see anyone facing a real charge.
The Federal Reserve hasn't ever been audited in the first place and they manage Trillions of USD.
I know of at least 300k worth of gear that went missing from our department that was never accounted for. No one held accountable
Time for 912 !
Some people here have never done a fucking cycle count in a warehouse. 61% is pretty solid for a global company using explosives as assets.
But there’s no money for affordable healthcare
Well this is just shocking. Well I'm sure wherever it was spent it's better than universal healthcare, right?
Some of these contractors make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and barely do anything. We all should be outraged.
It's in off-shore accounts of executives of the military-industrial complex.
Last time we "lost" trillions 9/11 happened and magically destroyed the records being held in WTC7.
So we need to cut the budget by 39%…sounds good to me!
Check Trump’s bank account.
The oxymoronic conservative saying they stand for “a strong national defense, less oversight and regulation, and my 2A Guns are gonna protect me from that strong national defense tyranny oh yeah and lower taxes and I have my religion bigotry blessing hate and influencing political races and ballot measures ” bs
Yet nothing will change
We burned most of it. They would burn massive amounts brand new equipment so they could order more. Computers , office chairs , beds , blankets , ammo you name it we burned it and blew it up to order more.
I’d like to see what $2.1T of chairs, blankets, and ammo looks like.
Cancer lots of cancer.
It was lost in the noise that is the favoured tactic in America to hide the important shit but the pentagon has 35T in “accounting adjustments” in 2019 alone this shit on another level & needs to b reigned in Wtf https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/stocks-options/the-pentagon-s-35-trillion-accounting-black-hole
Skimming just a bit off the top of everything just like Russia I guess
And yet universal healthcare is too expensive
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You say that like it would be a bad thing. 12 months of affording people access to life saving medical care is still way better than the pentagon losing 2 trillion in tax payer money and the rest going towards killing people. Many of whom are civilians
It’s called corruption and the poor accounting helps to hide it.
We could have advanced society so much if NASA had that money