The Pentagon racked up a total that’s larger than the entire U.S. economy.
According to reporting from Bloomberg, The Pentagon, which serves as the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense, made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments during 2019, representing a higher estimate from 2018 at $30.7 trillion and $29 trillion in 2017, according to Pentagon figures.
“Within that $30 trillion is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts,” said Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
This estimate, according to Sputnik News, is just the latest in a series of questionable financial results coming out of the Department of Defense. It was announced in November that the Pentagon failed its financial audit for the second consecutive year. The audit, which tracked the spending of over $2.9 trillion in Pentagon-owned and managed assets, detected a total of 25 “material weaknesses.”
The non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) listed a series of problems when it comes to The Pentagon budget, via Taxpayers For Common Sense, these were:
- About 58% of the material the Pentagon possesses ($36.9 billion worth) are items it does not need.
- Over the past three years, the Navy lost track of $3 billion in equipment and other items.
- At one distribution center for the Navy, there was a backlog of over 122,000 items that had not been properly processed, leading the Navy to purchase items it didn’t need.
- The $600 billion Pentagon inventory of weapons systems and other items failed to include nearly $6 billion in Army communications defense equipment, $7.6 billion in Navy aircraft engines and about $7 billion in Air Force electronic pods that attach to warplanes.
