I often quip to the TSA slack-jawed shamblers at the airport when I fly that I am happy the TSA exists because think of how much more homelessness there would in the USA if the unemployable weren’t in shitty government jobs hassling peaceful travelers.
The DoD has never passed an audit and in concert with programs at DoE, the budget item is approx one trillion dollars.
The chaos avalanche continues.
And with all this money spent, the US armed forces are not a long sustainment peer competitor in a hot war.
The Pentagon’s accounting records are so convoluted that billions of dollars cannot be accounted for, charges a new government report.
In fact, no major part of the Department of Defense (DOD) has ever passed an audit, according to recent congressional testimony by the non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress. The Pentagon admitted that flawed business systems and practices are common within the agency and said it would take decades to get all of the agency books in order. Accounting problems led the GAO in 1995 to put DOD financial management on GAO’s list of agencies that are at high-risk of waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.
Some of the GAO’s findings are astonishing:
About 58 percent of the material the Pentagon possesses ($36.9 billion worth) are items it does not need.
Over the past three years, the Navy lost track of $3 billion in equipment and other items.
At one distribution center for the Navy, there was a backlog of over 122,000 items that had not been properly processed, leading the Navy to purchase items it didn’t need.
The $600 billion Pentagon inventory of weapons systems and other items failed to include nearly $6 billion in Army communications defense equipment, $7.6 billion in Navy aircraft engines and about $7 billion in Air Force electronic pods that attach to warplanes.
Is national bankruptcy the sole solution to stop the malpractice and fiscal bleeding.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
