On this day in 2001 (the day before the 9/11 attacks), Donald Rumsfeld said this:
At the 14:15 mark, Rumsfeld says, “Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track 2.3 trillion dollars in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building. Because it’s stored on dozens of different technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.”
A DoD IG audit report was released on 25 February 2000 which said the following: “For the accounting entries, $2.3 trillion was not supported by adequate audit trails or sufficient evidence to determine their validity, $2 trillion was not reviewed because of time constraints, and $2.6 trillion were supported.”
In a July 2000 statement, Robert J. Lieberman, Assistant Inspector General at the time, also mentioned the $2.3 trillion number saying that the amount was “unsupported by reliable explanatory information and audit trails or were made to invalid general ledger accounts.”
The Pentagon just failed its sixth audit where 63% of four trillion dollars remains unaccounted for.
That’s approximately 2.5 trillion dollars.
2,500,000,000,000 dollars.
A stack of one billion dollars bills would be 67.9 miles high. A trillion dollar bills would reach 67,866 miles into space.
A trillion dollar bills, laid end to end, would stretch 96,906,656 miles—further than the distance of the earth to the sun.
A trillion dollars laid side to side, would cover more square miles than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
A trillion dollars on skids would need to be transported by 478 semi-trailers. Unloaded, it would fill a football field from sideline to sideline, and almost goal line to goal line.
If you were to spend $40/second, it would take 289 days to spend a billion dollars. And that’s at a spending rate of almost $3.456 million per day.
At the same spending rate of $40/second, it would take 792.5 years to blow through one trillion dollars.
That means that a stack of of 2.5 trillion one dollar bills reaches approximately 169,665 miles into space (the moon is 239,000 miles from Earth).
Here’s the proposed breakdown for the Pentagon fat-cats for the 2025 NDAA:
- President’s budget: $849.8 billion for the Defense Department
- House NDAA: $849.8 billion for the Defense Department
- House defense appropriations: Includes $833 billion in defense spending
- Senate Armed Services Committee: $878.4 billion for the Defense Department
- Senate Appropriations Committee: $852.2 billion defense spending
Topline budget numbers among the appropriations and authorizing committees aren’t apples to apples, with no single bill containing the whole of national defense spending.
The NDAA — which sanctions funds but does not actually obligate them — includes the Defense Department as well as defense spending within the Department of Energy, but does not include about $11.5 billion in national security spending outside the jurisdiction of the House and Senate armed services committees.
Meanwhile, House and Senate defense appropriations bills cover the Defense Department and some intelligence-related spending, but not defense spending at the Department of Energy.
http://breakingdefense.com/2024/09/f-35s-frigates-and-fra-woes-here-are-the-issues-facing-congress-in-upcoming-fy25-budget-process/
No one is in control and no one is accountable.
No one.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
