CONGRESS PETRIFIED: Pentagon to Undergo First Audit Ever
President Trump is a fiscal hawk. And no department of the government falls outside of scrutiny.
When then-candidate Trump noticed that government contracts were never on-time and on-budget, that was a warning. Reason discussed Trump’s comments at the time:
At an appearance in New Hampshire, Trump went into full Tea Party Beast Mode, attacking virtually every aspect of government spending, including what President Eisenhower famously vilified as the “military-industrial complex”:
On defense, in a race in which all of his Republican rivals favor increasing military spending, Trump promised instead to go after waste and profiteering in the defense industry. “I hear stories, like they’re ordering missiles they don’t want because of politics, because of special interests,” Trump said. “Because the company that makes the missiles is a contributor.” There is so much of that kind of corruption in the Pentagon, Trump said, that he will be able to build up the military without actually spending more, just by putting an end to wasteful and corrupt practices.
And now we get news of an audit of the Pentagon.
Back in May, Pentagon comptroller, David Norquist, the previous CFO for the Department of Homeland Security announced the audit.
“Starting an audit is a matter of driving change inside a bureaucracy that may resist it,” Norquist told members of the Armed Services Committee.
According to the DoD release:
The audit is massive. It will examine every aspect of the department from personnel to real property to weapons to supplies to bases. Some 2,400 auditors will fan out across the department to conduct it, Pentagon officials said.“It is important that the Congress and the American people have confidence in DoD’s management of every taxpayer dollar,” Norquist said. -defense.gov
You can bet there are many at the Pentagon sweating this audit.
And so are government contractors. So guess where all this will eventually lead? Congress.
Nothing reveals swamp creatures like an audit. And when it comes to missing monies at the Pentagon, we aren’t exactly talking rounding errors.
As Zero Hedge reports, we’re talking multiple trillions of missing money:
The Pentagon is no stranger to criticism over serious waste and purposefully sloppy accounting. A DoD Inspector General’s report from 2016 – which appears to be unavailable on the DoD website (but fortunately WAS archived)- found that in 2015 alone a staggering $6.5 trillion in funds was unaccounted for out of the Army’s budget, with $2.8 trillion in “wrongful adjustments” occurring in just one quarter.
In 2015, the Pentagon denied trying to shelve a study detailing $125 billion in waste created by a bloated employee counts for noncombat related work such as human resources, finance, health care management and property management. The report concluded that $125 billion could be saved by making those operations more efficient.
On September 10th, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,” after a Pentagon whistleblower set off a probe. A day later, the September 11th attacks happened and the accounting scandal was quickly forgotten.
You might want to pull a few dollars out of military subcontractor stocks soon. Because you can bet there will be big fines, if they find what I believe they will find.
