Republicans and Democrats have for years fought about whether the Pentagon’s budget is too small, too big, or just right. And President Trump has made clear his intention to grow the Pentagon budget, although at times he has shown he recognizes there is a lot of waste at the Department of Defense.
However, the Pentagon’s recent announcement that it failed its first-ever audit should bring any growth plans to a screeching halt. The failure came 28 years after Congress passed a law mandating that all federal agencies be audited. In 2010, Congress gave the Pentagon an extra seven years to do the audit.
Defense News reports that DOD officials say no fraud or abuse was found in the 21 smaller audits which made up the full investigation of $2.7 trillion in audited dollars. There were no issues found in military pay.
But only five of the 21 smaller audits received a passing grade. Yet Reuters, Defense News, and other media outlets report that Pentagon officials praised themselves for the alleged success of just getting the audit accomplished. Any private-sector CEO would be laughed out of a job for such self-congratulation.
Additionally, the Pentagon’s claim that no fraud or abuse was found in $2.7 trillion spent is both astonishing and entirely lacking in credibility. First, as NPR reported last year, the Government Accountability Office considers the Pentagon an agency with “serious financial problems.” That status is not new.
Second, there have been many egregious examples of Pentagon waste and fraud over the years. While past isn’t always prologue, there is ample evidence that just like other federal agencies, the Pentagon spends a lot of money that doesn’t do much to achieve its mission.
Perhaps the most famous fraud came when billions of dollars were shipped to rebuild Iraq. Auditors found at least eight billion was wasted. Billions more just vanished. A former inspector general who spent years looking for the missing money told The Guardian in 2014 that after more than one billion was found in Lebanon, relevant U.S. agencies collectively shrugged.
More recently and just as shocking is a 2015 report which — as exposed by The Washington Post — the Pentagon buried. That report found the Pentagon could save $25 billion per year for five years, largely through elimination of administrative inefficiencies.
In 2017, Congress discovered that the Army lied in 2015 about scrapping a program which had cost $725 million over a decade. The program was full of fraud and other issues. That’s small change compared to trillions of dollars in potentially disappeared dollars between 1998 and 2015 which Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff discovered last year.
There’s also simple incompetence. GAO found in its 2012 duplication report tens of billions of dollars in potential savings for the Pentagon. And in 2016 GAO found millions more in potential savings from greater efficiency. Multiple reports show that contractors have squandered taxpayer dollars through overspending and inefficiency.
A host of other savings have been collected by Guide for a Strong America.
Third and finally, Congress often tells the Pentagon to use taxpayer money on programs the Pentagon doesn’t want. It happened in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. Some of that was due to prioritization because of sequestration. Some of it was due to political considerations because conservative lawmakers wanted to spend more on defense than the Obama administration requested.
But much of it was due to pork-barrel politics. Few members of Congress, even fiscal conservatives who say government jobs aren’t economically beneficial, don’t want military jobs in their district or state ended.
A Department of Defense press release announcing the audit results said it had been started “in order to find problems and fix them.” It looks like they failed in the former, and that’s why they won’t accomplish the latter.
Dustin Siggins is founder of Proven Media Solutions, a communications strategy and media relations firm.
