The Pentagon has made no progress on bringing its multi-trillion dollar budget under control, with just seven out of 30 annual sub-audits being given a clean bill of health – exactly the same as in 2022.
With the Department of Defense (DOD) boasting $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities, the sums of money the Pentagon and independent auditors have been unable to account for is vast – yet officials have spun the findings as a “sixth year of progress” instead of acknowledging them as a sixth year of failure.
Pentagon Comptroller Michael McCord even appeared to indicate it is unreasonable for taxpayers to expect a clean or “unmodified” opinion on its budget, complaining that “[i]f even one large component of DOD, such as a military department, doesn’t have an unmodified opinion, it’s mathematically impossible for the entire department to have one,” and dismissing the fiasco as “not a surprise.”
Even before the 2023 audit, House Republicans had been grilling the Pentagon on its careless and opaque use of public money, with Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisc.) observing at a hearing earlier this year that “[t]he American people work diligently to earn every dollar, but it seems the [Defense Department] has become a master of squandering those funds without batting an eye.”
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