The Department Of Defense Doesn’t Have A Clue What The Pentagon Spent 8.5 Trillion Dollars On
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Audits of all federal agencies were mandated by law
beginning in 1996, but the Pentagon is unique in never having complied.
In almost 20 years, the Pentagon has never accounted for trillions it
spent, in part because “plugging”—fudging the numbers—is standard
operating procedure.
According to the investigation, employees of the
Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s primary
accounting agency, were routinely told by superiors to take
“unsubstantiated change actions.” These plugs—which amounted to
falsifying the books—were used to bring the military’s figures in line
with the Treasury’s when discrepancies couldn’t be traced and accounted
for. According to DFAS employee, Linda Woodford, “A lot of times there
were issues of numbers being inaccurate. We didn’t have the detail . . .
for a lot of it.” This so-called plugging isn’t unique to DFAS—when it
comes to resolving lost or missing information, it’s just business as
usual in every branch of the service.
When it was announced that the military’s budget
would be cut by $52 billion in 2014, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel
had a fit, telling
a defense conference: “[The cuts are] too deep, too steep, and too
abrupt. This is an irresponsible way to govern and it forces the
department into a very bad set of choices.” This is quite befuddling to
the rest of us, as the $581 billion budget
that year was more than the total of the next 10 biggest spenders
combined—including Russia, China, and even Saudi Arabia (whose military
budget made up 10.7% of their total GDP). In fact, the US budget was a
full one-third of the entire amount spent on defense worldwide. If the
DoD is this concerned about losing money to budget cuts, perhaps it
should consider tackling its own systemic irresponsibility and discern
what, precisely, $8.5 trillion in taxpayer funds has already paid for.
Many of the problems occurred in simple bookkeeping
errors rather than actual financial losses. This was the case of one
Columbus, Ohio DFAS office whose duplicate entries across multiple
ledgers led to errors in financial reports for the Air Force in 2009,
totaling $1.59 trillion—trillion—including $538 billion for plugs, which
amounts to roughly 8 times what was allotted for the entire Air Force
budget that year.
But the errors and manipulated numbers, though
obviously problems in their own right, simply compound the issue for a
Defense Department that seemingly has no control over its excessive
spending habits.
The Defense Logistics Agency is responsible for
supplying just about everything imaginable for the DoD. As Paltrow puts
it, “everything from airplane parts to zippers for uniforms.” Speaking
in a meeting with aviation industry executives in 2013, DLA director and
Navy Vice Admiral Mark Harnitchek explained, “We have about $14 billion
in inventory for lots of reasons, and probably half of that is excess
to what we need.” But it keeps buying more—often adding to inventory of
which there is already a surplus.
In one example, the DLA had stockpiled 15,000 Humvee
front suspensions as of 2008, which is the equivalent of a 14 year
supply. Yet somehow between 2010-2012, defying both logic and prudence
entirely, the agency purchased 7,437 more of those same parts—at
significantly higher cost than those already gathering dust on warehouse
shelves—at a time when demand had been cut in half.
As of September 2012, the DLA and military had
already ordered $733 million in duplicates of existing supernumerary
supplies, which was a 21% increase from the $609 million it spent on the
same asinine duplication the previous year. All this stuff makes a
comprehensive inventory impossible, and a worker in the DLA’s largest
warehouse explained there is no system for verifying that items are
stored correctly or even to track or estimate how much is lost to
employee theft.
These examples only touch on the enormity of the
Pentagon’s mystical record-keeping, poor decision-making, and insanely
wasteful spending problems. Taken in another context, they represent an
acute criticism of priorities.
As of 2013, there were 45.3 million people, including 14.7 million children, living in poverty
in the US—14.5% of the population, which is the largest number in the
52 years such statistics have been kept. But instead of focusing sharp
criticism on the causes for such an outrageous number, politicians
target “wasteful” spending by food stamp recipients by passing into law
prohibitions for purchasing items like steak. But if members of Congress
find a steak wasteful, what about 22,437 superfluous Humvee front ends?
Hey, government: you’re doing it wrong.
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