The U.S. military suffers from a severe accounting deficiency.
Via Responsible Statecraft, Nov. 2022:
Last week, the Department of Defense revealed that it had failed its fifth consecutive audit…
The Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets…
The news came as no surprise to Pentagon watchers. After all, the U.S. military has the distinction of being the only U.S. government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit.
But what did raise some eyebrows was the fact that DoD made almost no progress in this year’s bookkeeping: Of the 27 areas investigated, only seven earned a clean bill of financial health…
The Pentagon’s most famous recent boondoggle is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to date. But examples of overruns abound: As Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jack Reed (D-RI) wrote in 2020, the lead vessel for every one of the Navy’s last eight combatant ships came in at least 10 percent over budget, leading to more than $8 billion in additional costs.
Conservatives who want the state to run like a business should be rightfully outraged that the U.S. military, with its $886 billion effective budget request for 2023, expects that it can skate by with five consecutive failed audits and somehow still escape any kind of fiscal reckoning from the institutions of public trust tasked with its oversight.
Related: Leak of Classified Documents on Ukraine, China, and the Middle East a ‘Nightmare’ Says Pentagon
Jon Stewart recently pressed Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks on this issue. Unforthcoming, defensive, and condescending, she came out looking less than stellar. If her mission was to assuage public concerns over how her bosses put to use the hundreds of billions of dollars with which they are entrusted, she failed.
The entire six-minute clip is worth watching, if for no other reason than to gain a deeper appreciation of the hubris and disdain that bureaucrats like Hicks have for the media and the public that consumes it. No one in a position of authority has reminded them that they are public servants for years, and so naturally they are offended by probing questions about their publicly-funded activities.
Here is a truncated version of Stewart’s questioning, as transcribed via Task & Purpose:
Now, I may not understand exactly the ins and outs, and the incredible magic of an audit. But I’m a human being who lives on the Earth and can’t figure out how $850 billion to a department means that the rank and file still have to be on food stamps. To me, that’s f***ing corruption. And I’m sorry. And, if like, that blows your mind and you think that’s like a crazy agenda for me to have, I really think that that’s institutional thinking.
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