>>22658697

>"Give Us Back Our Fu*#ing Money." How Washington Stole Everything.

"Give Us Back Our Fu*#ing Money." How Washington Stole Everything.

By CDM Staff

February 26, 2025

0

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Every person in your family or community living on nuts and bolts and berries has had his life stolen by the bureaucratic blob.

And, we are going to get it all back.

So essentially the entire town of Washington, D.C. has been stealing. The anomalies are those who are not stealing. $4.7 trillion, almost impossible to trace, represents two-thirds of the annual U.S. budget. And if it’s happening in the U.S., it is happening everywhere: France, Canada, the U.K., Germany, where budgetary processes are probably even more opaque than those of the U.S.

How does the Department of Defence have a $35 trillion black hole?

I used to think of people who worked for the government with a kind of veiled contempt or, in a more benign mood, compassion. I thought of them as pity jobs for those without initiative, as jobs paying off lefty campaigners, as a warehouse for the barely competent. In my own dealings with them, I found them punitive and extractive, papering me with demands to spend more and more money to hire more and more of their pet contractors, to get approval. In my working life, looking at the results of their involvement in America’s rural areas, I hated them for the hell they visited on people unable to fight back. They forced bad science on good people, and refused to see reason. They ruined forests, water courses, fisheries, and township after township turned to dustbowl status. The misery in rural sitting rooms in every state in the U.S. was palpable, long lasting; the green Blob ruined families for generations…

To read more visit Elizabeth Nickson Substack.

>>22658783

>How does the Department of Defence have a $35 trillion black hole?

The Pentagon’s $35 Trillion Accounting Black Hole

Michael Rainey

January 23, 2020 2 min read

While it shouldn’t come as a surprise for an organization that has famously failed to ever pass an audit, the Pentagon was nevertheless able to shock some observers this week with a new batch of financial numbers.

According to Bloomberg’s Anthony Carpaccio, the Department of Defense made $35 trillion in “accounting adjustments” in 2019, easily surpassing the $30.7 trillion in such adjustments recorded in 2018.

Carpaccio notes that the number “dwarfs the $738 billion of defense-related funding in the latest U.S. budget, a spending plan that includes the most expensive weapons systems in the world including the F-35 jet as well as new aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines.” It’s also “larger than the entire U.S. economy and underscores the Defense Department’s continuing difficulty in balancing its books.”

So what are these accounting adjustments? Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says they represent “a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts” within the Pentagon. “A lot” may be an understatement: According to government data, there were 562,568 adjustments made in the Pentagon’s books in 2018.

Why it matters: More broadly, the number highlights the persistent lack of internal financial controls at the Pentagon, which makes it extremely difficult to account properly for spending in the largest government budget. “Although it gets scant public attention compared with airstrikes, troop deployments, sexual assault statistics or major weapons programs, the reliability of the Pentagon’s financial statement is an indication of how effectively the military manages its resources considering that it receives over half of discretionary domestic spending,” Carpaccio says.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA), who asked the Government Accountability Office to look into the issue, said the “combined errors, shorthand, and sloppy record-keeping by DoD accountants do add up to a number nearly 1.5 times the size of the U.S. economy,” and charged that the Pentagon “employs accounting adjustments like a contractor paints over mold. Their priority is making the situation look manageable, not solving the underlying problem.”

>>22658783

>>22658791

>>How does the Department of Defence have a $35 trillion black hole?

America’s Missing Money

The federal government can’t account for $21 trillion—but does anybody care?

/ Eye on the News / Economy, finance, and budgets, Politics and law

Feb 16 2018

/ Share

During last month’s State of the Union address, President Trump called on Congress to end the automatic budget caps enacted in 2013, which have significantly limited the expansion of defense spending. In a rare show of political support, the chiefs of staff of each armed-service branch cheered the president’s call. And yet, unmentioned in the House chamber—and unnoticed by most viewers—was the fact that trillions of dollars meant to support American troops have been spent for purposes unknown even to our elected representatives.

On September 10, 2001, then U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disclosed that his department was unable to account for roughly $2.3 trillion worth of transactions. The next day, the U.S. sustained the terrorist attacks that changed the world, and this startling revelation was forgotten.

When an account discrepancy occurs that cannot be traced, it’s customary to make what is called an “un-documentable adjustment.” This is similar to when your checkbook balance is off by, say, ten dollars; you add or subtract that amount to make everything balance with the bank. In 1999, the amount that the Pentagon adjusted was eight times the Defense Department budget for that year; it was one-third greater than the entire federal budget.

By 2015, the amount reported missing by the Office of the Inspector General had increased to $6.5 trillion—and that was just for the army. Using public data from federal databases, Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics at Michigan State University, found that $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments had been reported by the Defense and Housing and Urban Development departments between 1998 and 2015. That’s about $65,000 for every American.

There is no sign that the government’s internal auditors have made much headway in finding the missing money. Jim Minnery of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service traveled the country in 2002 looking for documents on just $300 million worth of unrecorded spending. “We know it’s gone. But we don’t know what they spent it on,” he said. He was reassigned after suggesting that higher-ups covered up the problem by writing it off. He’s not the only who thinks so. “The books are cooked routinely year after year,” says former defense analyst Franklin C. Spinney.

According to a 2013 Reuters report, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a 1996 law that requires annual audits of all government departments. The Pentagon has spent tens of billions of dollars to upgrade to more efficient technology in order to become audit-ready. But many of these new systems have failed and been scrapped.

>>22658797

>The federal government can’t account for $21 trillion—but does anybody care?

Predictably, the government did not race to correct the problem even after investigators sounded the alarm. Skidmore contacted the Office of the Inspector General but was not permitted to speak to anyone who had worked on the corruption report. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office assured him that congressional hearings would have been held if there was a significant problem. When Rumsfeld eventually did appear before Congress in March 2005, his testimony offered no substantive answers.

In short: the military doesn’t know how its budget is being spent. The “total military expenditures” that analysts so confidently cite are whatever the Treasury Department says they are, and the individual line items, at least for the army, are for the most part unknown. If money is being diverted from the armed forces, the losses are degrading our defense capability in ways difficult to observe. The same is true on a smaller scale for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where billions in missing expenditures could have gone to support the perennially cash-strapped federal mortgage-loan program, and possibly other unrelated programs, without congressional knowledge or approval.

Though each passing year diminishes the likelihood that already-disbursed funds will be tracked down, Americans should insist on a renewed effort to rein in future discrepancies. The Trump presidency presents a fresh chance to prioritize accountability, and the president campaigned on robust military spending and reducing government waste. With congressional cooperation, the president should ask the secretaries of the Departments of Defense and of Housing and Urban Development to testify about any misplaced spending, and commission new independent audits of their expenses. This ongoing mismanagement of the public trust—and public dollars—is possibly the greatest silent scandal in America today.

Terrence Leveck is a physician who graduated from the University of Colorado School of Medicine in 1972. He did a general surgery residency in the Army at Fort Lewis, Washington, and spent most of his career doing emergency medicine in Kentucky and Tennessee.

>>22658783

>"Give Us Back Our Fu*#ing Money." How Washington Stole Everything.

>>22658791

>The Pentagon’s $35 Trillion Accounting Black Hole

>>22658>>22658797

796

>All looted.

infuriating

>>22658799

DOGE Raises Alarm Over $4.7 Trillion 'Almost Impossible' to Trace

Published Feb 18, 2025 at 5:27 AM EST

Updated Feb 18, 2025 at 4:18 PM EST

The Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said the Treasury Department did not enforce a tracking code, making it "almost impossible" to trace around $4.7 trillion in federal payments.

Newsweek has contacted DOGE and the Treasury for comment via email outside regular working hours.

Why It Matters

DOGE, headed by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has been tasked by President Donald Trump with making drastic cuts to federal spending and waste. They have faced criticism and legal challenges over mass layoffs and the dismantling of federal agencies.

Elon Musk in Cannes

Elon Musk attends a session during the Cannes Lions International Festival Of Creativity on June 19, 2024 in Cannes, France. Marc Piasecki/Getty Images

What to Know

The tracking code in question is the Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) identification code. According to the Bureau Fiscal of the Fiscal, these codes—assigned by the Treasury Department, in collaboration with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—serve to track financial transactions and data.

All federal government financial transactions are classified by TAS for reporting to the Treasury and OMB.

In a Monday post on X, formerly Twitter, DOGE said that within the federal government, the TAS field was optional for about $4.7 trillion in payments and was "often left blank, making traceability almost impossible."

DOGE said the field would now be required for federal spending following an agreement with the Treasury.

Musk's team has targeted the Treasury as part of its sweeping plans to reduce federal spending.

In a late Sunday post on X, DOGE said that eliminating paper checks issued by federal agencies would save around $750 million per year.

DOGE said the Treasury processed 116 million paper checks in fiscal 2024 and maintains a "physical lockbox" network to collect checks for tax and passport purposes. DOGE claimed it costs $2.40 per check to "maintain this lockbox network."

It is unclear where DOGE obtained these figures, which have not been verified by Newsweek.

On Friday, a federal judge extended a block preventing DOGE staffers from accessing the Treasury Department's payment system, which controls trillions of dollars in federal payments and contains personal details of federal employees.

DOGE said on its website that its work has already resulted in an estimated $55 billion in savings.

What People Are Saying

DOGE, in a Monday post on X: "The Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process). In the federal government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. Thanks to @USTreasury for the great work."

Elon Musk posted on X: "Major improvement in Treasury payment integrity going live! This was a combined effort of @DOGE, @USTreasury, and @FederalReserve. Nice work by all."

Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, chair of the House Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee, wrote on X: "$4.7 TRILLION in untraceable payments!!!!! That's 4.7 trillion reasons that make it hard to believe this was a mistake or incompetence even."

What Happens Next

DOGE is set to continue its efforts to make mass cuts across the federal government. Musk has said he could cut "at least $2 trillion" from government spending by eradicating "waste." That amounts to cutting around 30 percent of total federal government spending.

>>22658806

>DOGE Raises Alarm Over $4.7 Trillion 'Almost Impossible' to Trace

>>22658796

>All looted.

infuriating

>>22658852

>>22658861