The Pentagon. (photo: AP)
The
Pentagon Has Never Been Audited. That's Astonishing
By Thomas Hedges, Guardian
UK
20 March 17
The president proposes a $52bn increase in military spending while
reports of waste and abuse pile up. An investigation must scrutinise spending
On
Thursday, Donald Trump released a preliminary budget proposal that calls for a
$52bn increase in military spending.
But just last December, a Washington Post investigation found that the Pentagon had
buried a report that outlines $125bn in waste at the Department of Defense.
That gap between lawmakers’ calls to blindly increase spending at DoD versus
those of internal auditors to curtail its waste isn’t a new problem, and it’s
one that, without pressure, won’t be resolved any time soon.
That’s
because although it’s required to by law, the DoD has never had an audit,
something every American person, every company and every other government
agency is subject to. The result is an astounding $10tn in taxpayer money that
has gone unaccounted for since 1996.
“Over
the last 20 years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when
an audit would be completed,” the director of the Audit
the Pentagon coalition, Rafael DeGennaro, told the Guardian.
“Meanwhile, Congress has more than doubled the Pentagon’s budget.”
Legislation
in the early 1990s demanded that all government agencies had annual audits, but
the Pentagon has exempted itself without consequence for 20 years now, telling
the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that collecting and organizing the
required information for a full audit is too costly and time-consuming.
In the
meantime, the GAO and Office of the Inspector General (IG) have published an
endless stream of reports documenting financial mismanagement: $500m in aid to
Yemen lost here, $5.8bn in supplies lost there, $8,000 spent on helicopter gears that really cost
$500.
As
reports and news articles about waste and abuse at the Pentagon pile up,
prominent voices from across the political spectrum – from Bernie Sanders to
Ted Cruz to Grover Norquist – are expressing support for a full audit of DoD.
In a 2013 video message to the whole of the defense department, then secretary
of defense Chuck Hagel told employees that the department’s non-compliance was
“unacceptable”. During this past election cycle, both the Democratic and
Republican platforms called for the Pentagon’s audit.
But
despite broad support, the issue has remained stagnant in Washington. “I really
can’t figure it out,” Democratic party representative for California Barbara
Lee told the Guardian. When legislators get around to tackling waste, they “go
after domestic agencies and community organizations, but they never go after
the Pentagon,” she said. Since 2013, she has introduced bipartisan legislation
that would financially penalize DoD for not receiving a clean audit.
“Quite
frankly, they should have been audit-ready decades ago, after Congress passed
the initial audit law in the early 90s,” Republican representative for Texas
Michael Burgess, co-sponsor of the Audit the Pentagon Act along with Lee, told
the Guardian. People have “accepted that the Department of Defense is expensive
and that that’s how business has to be done. But I don’t accept that.”
Others
say the problem goes beyond bureaucracy. William Hartung is the director of the
Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, and he says
private contractors have found a way to make use of the Pentagon’s struggle to
get its books in order. Contractors, he says, will “periodically intervene to
try to stop practices that would make them more accountable”.
Specifically,
the defense industry has sought to weaken the
office of the director, operational test and evaluation (DOT&E) at the
Department of Defense, which evaluates weapons systems before they’re
manufactured on a larger scale. “It’s one of the few places that’s revealed a
lot of problems,” says Hartung. The DOT&E, for example, has uncovered flaws in Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet program among
a slew of other contracts. “The concept is: benefit from a dysfunctional system
because they can charge however much they want and there’s not a lot of quality
control,” says Hartung.
Another
issue is the proximity between DoD and the private sector, something that
appears to touch even the department’s inspector general’s office. In 2014, the
Pentagon celebrated the Marine Corps’s success at being the first
military agency to pass an audit. But a year later it was found that the
private accounting firm hired to carry out the audit, Grant Thornton, had not
been thorough. The Marine Corps had desperately wanted to achieve a “clean”
status, due to pressure from then defense secretary Leon Panetta to get its
books in order.
In a
scathing response to the
debacle, Republican senator for Iowa Chuck Grassley said that the actions of the DoD IG showed a “lack
of independence and flagrant disregard for audit ethics”, calling the deputy IG
for auditing “a Grant Thornton lapdog”.
Washington’s
revolving door also touches the agency, with a number of high-profile
individuals moving to the private sector after leaving their jobs, something
that is perfectly within the law and government regulations.
In the
end, Hartung says that the military’s stature and almost holy status make
focusing on accountability difficult. If lobbying doesn’t work, he says, they
can always “wrap themselves in the flag and say this is necessary for defense.
But if people don’t poke into the details,” they won’t “find out that, in fact,
not every penny being spent is sacrosanct”.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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