Pentagon fails audit (again)
4 Min Read
The Pentagon has failed its audit for the third year in a row, as major US news organizations buried the news which broke on November 17, says Dave Lindorff.
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“No one in the US government can honestly say how much the Pentagon requires each year.”
Dave Lindorff, a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist, wrote about what should have been one of the biggest news of 2021: The admission of “Pentagon officials that they “failed again” but saw “progress,” and as promising that they would achieve a “clean” audit by… 2027”.
Lindorff divulged that the story which broke on November 17, was buried by major US news organizations such as Washington Post and The New York Times.
Who’s counting?
The Pentagon, which has $3 trillion in assets and a record current 2021 budget of $738 billion, has failed its audit for the third year in a row. An army of 1400 auditors hired by US taxpayers for $230 million and borrowed from some of the country's largest auditing firms spent the past year poring over the books and visiting hundreds of operations of the government's largest and geographically vast single agency, and returned with the news that they couldn't give it a pass, according to Lindorff.
The journalist went on to say that the US military, which consumes nearly half of the US $1.6 trillion discretionary budget, is a “financial black hole!”
"Nobody in the White House Budget Office, the Congressional Armed Services or Budget Committees, the General Accounting Office, or the Pentagon itself can say with a straight face how much the Pentagon spends of all the funds it receives from Congress each year, where that money goes, or even where all the equipment it buys — planes, ammunition, bombs, ships, and so on — is currently located.”
He stressed that no one in the US government can honestly say how much the Pentagon requires each year, which explains why the Pentagon budget keeps increasing with no justification whatsoever.
It is crucial to note here that the US has the largest military budget in the world, more than quadruple the budget of its closest rival China.
Read More: The US Is Running Out of Money, Literally (Part II)
“The incredible $21 trillion fraud”
Lindorff recalled when he exposed in a Nation MagazIne cover story “the incredible $21-trillion fraud that has been going on at the Pentagon for over two decades of deliberate budget obfuscation” in 2019.
At the time, he wrote that “if this kind of scandalous behavior were occurring in any other government department, it would be huge news in the media, and would prompt angry hearings in Congress”.
“Imagine, for example, if the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, or perhaps the Department of State couldn’t pass an audit!”
He stressed that “the fact that the Pentagon can't explain what it's doing with the 50 cents on every dollar of taxes that Americans pay to the Treasury each year from their hard-earned paychecks, and that no government official can either, and the fact that Congress keeps shoveling more and more money into the five-sided black hole across the Potomac River, year after year, should have the entire country up in arms”.
“Why are we allowing this outrage to continue?”
Lindorff tersely criticized the US administration which, "instead of looking for ways to pull the US out of provocative locations around the globe where all it has been able to do since the end of WWII with its awesome weapons, enormous Navy and the huge standing military is sow instability, support violent coups, invade countries that don’t do the US’ bidding and drop bombs, drone-fired rockets and send in Special Forces troops in countries that the US has no right to be in (think Syria, Somalia, Niger, Haiti, Yemen, Iraq, etc.)."
The criticism extended to the current administration, with Lindorff calling out US president Joe Biden for considering sending weapons and trainers to Ukraine, as well as "missile-carrying destroyers into the Black Sea off Russia’s coast, attacking Iran (or allowing "Israel" to do the dirty work), provoking China in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, and who knows what else”.
Read More: Is This the Fall of US Strategy in Afghanistan?
The Philadelphia-based journalist believed that Biden can do so because money isn't an issue for the Pentagon. The Pentagon gets whatever it wants, even though it cannot tell anyone, and most likely does not know, where the money goes.
“I hope people will ponder this question. Why are we allowing this outrage to continue? ”, he concluded.
