The Pentagon has for years routinely been doctoring its budget numbers, and has no idea where billions of its money is going.
Good enough for government work: The Pentagon has for years routinely been doctoring its budget numbers, and has no idea where billions of its money is going.
In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
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Good enough for government work: The Pentagon has for years routinely been doctoring its budget numbers, and has no idea where billions of its money is going.
In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Reuters… they’re the people who Photoshop their news photos. I don’t think they bring clean hands to any investigation.
Yeah, point well taken. At the same time, I find it completely believable that the Pentagon’s finances are as screwed up and corrupted as this report alleges.
Especially in light of the fact that corruption at the pentagon is a story I’ve been hearing and reading about for years and years. How much smoke do the taxpayers need before they see the fire? It’s a wide open money pit…
Its not just the Pentagon. None of the gov agencies use anything like solid (or even legal) accounting practices. So its common for any of them to be unable to really answer basic questions like – how much did you spend on that?… This is often allows rediculas cost claims for various program – allowing congress to pork up the numbers coming into a district from a given project.
A flip side is they can bury other things costs in a unrelated program. For example the shuttle program carried the cost for supporting lots of NASA facilities, that wern’t in anyway supporting the shuttle; but since NASA politically couldn’t close them – someone needed to pay for them and their staffs. So Shuttle carried billions in overhead for departmenbts, buildings, etc – that never did anything related to the Shuttles program or its cargo.
Corruption in government? Say it isn’t so!
Agreed. It does not seem that the unaccounted-for money in any of the government agencies is embezzled into individuals’ pockets, but it seems that it is not going where Congress had intended — or where Congress wanted us to think it was going.
As people keep saying, if a company were run like this, people would go to jail. We keep complaining about lax accounting in the government, but unlike companies, we do not insist upon annual independent auditing of the books.
I propose that we start insisting upon quality control in government.
Auditing the books and making people accountable would be a nice start, and should result in better retention of receipts and invoices for tracking where that money is going (and ensuring that the money is allocated to keeping NASA facilities open rather than depending upon accounting slight of hand).
Quality in legislation would be a good next or concurrent step — reduce the unintended consequences, such as the things that we are finding in the ACA (Obamacare) law. If businesses produced products bad as our government’s laws, they would quickly go out of business. We pay a lot of money for those laws, we should get quality laws.
You know – it should be a gov project to have themselves aidited. I mean its not like they pay in cash, or have their own bank – and banks have EXCEPTIONALLY DETAILED of every transfer of money between all accounts – so all the data is there.