.
This just in.
Apparently the Auditors assigned the Department of Defense just came back to Congress, saying that the DOD was impossible to audit. I don't have references for you, partly because the incident is a little too recent, and partly because, well, this is the DOD, and they hate to let the public know anything.
Bear in mind that Defense eats up at least half of the Federal Budget. Every year. So half the revenue of the Federal Government, from the present day, under the Obama Administration, to as far back as the Nixon Administration, and very probably even further in the past, the Department of Defense has operated without fiscal supervision. It seems that the DOD does not know how much money it presently has in its accounts.
Of course the DOD subsumes the security branches such as Homeland Security, and somewhere in there is the NSA, the CIA, and various other department that we probably don't even suspect to exist. Disclosing all their accounts might compromise --heh heh-- their effectiveness. So there's a ton of money there, something like 3 trillion by some estimates, which might easily slide into private hands.
Meanwhile, because of intermittent Congressional temper tantrums over the bottomless pit that the DOD is, from time to time we hear that some members of the armed forces are suddenly sent a zero paystub, saying that they actually owe the government money, for reasons that are not forthcoming. This is, of course, SOP (Standard Operation Procedure) for the armed services, namely to pass the buck down to defenseless employees. I have to wonder whether this satisfies the Congressmen who demand to know where the taxpayer's money is going, or whether the serviceman without a paycheck is encouraged to go entreat his congressman to lay off the thumbscrews on the DOD finances.
I am pissed, but more amused. This is one thing the Libertarians could really get their teeth into, but of course they're too busy griping about Hillary Clinton to take notice of this sort of major financial fiasco. There's also the fact that this is simply the most recent in a series of fiascos that include exorbitant prices for fantastic aircraft that are never built, $640 toilet seats, and so on. It is probably an actual strategy of the DOD to from time to time float out a minor financial scandal to distract the public, while trillions are being thrown haphazardly at such money suckers as Halliburton, Martin Marietta, Lockheed, and similar. The problem is that these companies are in a position to blackmail the government in various ways, so they are impossible to face down.
That's all I have for the moment.
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