Opinion: Why Can't the Pentagon Pass an Audit?

At the end of 2023, the Pentagon failed its sixth straight annual audit. To put that into perspective, the Pentagon started auditing itself in 2018 and has not passed a single one since. This practice began at the behest of a Congressional mandate back in 1990, which the Pentagon has only recently even tried to comply with. The process consisted of 29 sub-audits with over 1,600 auditors doing 700 site visits, and ultimately only 7 out of these 29 passed. 

Audits allow the federal government to monitor their many agencies and confirm that funding is utilized properly. This specific audit is a method of assessing the recordkeeping process for the Pentagon’s weapons systems, military personnel, and many properties scattered around the globe. Since 2018, when the Pentagon began reporting and failing its audits, Congress has approved roughly 4 trillion dollars of funding in spite of the DoD’s utter inability to turn up a clean record. 

Michael McCord, the chief financial office for the Dept. of Defense, spoke of a “clean” audit when questioned, saying, “Things are showing progress, but it's not enough”. It is a joke for the government to try and praise so-called progress towards a clean audit in the face of this year’s continued streak of failures. 1.9 trillion dollars has been left unaccounted for, an act which no other federal agency could get away with; especially without facing strict punishment, endless Congressional hearings, demands to remove their leaders, and calls to defund those agencies altogether. 

The Pentagon’s failure stems from Congress's own failure to acknowledge these failed audits and hold their agencies accountable. To get honest audits, the consequences of failure must be made clear. Instead, Congress continually ignores the sheer amount of money they give the Pentagon to burn, as demonstrated by the newly passed National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, giving the Dept. of Defense an additional and record breaking $886 billion dollar budget for 2024. 

More and more money is funneled into puppet wars and the surveillance state as our economy suffers with the opioid epidemic, housing crises, and skyrocketing inflation rates. The U.S. has had a long history of supporting smaller nations in international conflicts, a practice some have deemed “puppet wars.” One of the first examples of a so-called puppet war was our involvement in the Vietnam War, in which we lent support to South Vietnam in their conflict with the North. Similarly, the Korean War saw U.S. involvement in a dispute between the North and South of Korea. In both of these conflicts, The United States international anti-communist interests  superseded their concerns domestically. To this day, we continue to see the U.S. funding other countries’ conflicts to varying levels of involvement and public support. Ukraine’s ongoing fighting with Russia is one such example, while our technological and economic support of Israel is another. The extent to which our involvement in these foreign altercations is relevant to Americans at-home has long been argued, and will continue to be argued, however, the boatloads of money being shipped overseas might just be better off doing work on our soil instead. 

While we perpetually fund these wars, school districts in the U.S. don’t have sufficient equipment or staff to provide the proper education every child deserves. These funds could be improving our nation, making life easier for Americans, reducing stress, and giving our economy a chance to thrive. Instead, this money is pledged to the Pentagon and their murky objectives,which more often than not don’t directly serve the interests of the American people. 

It’s simple: the more Congress continues to fund the Pentagon without any consequences- the longer they will continue to fail audits. That means money without a proper paper trail may be misused, when it could’ve been allocated towards the American people. We deserve transparency in knowing where our taxes are going. It is alarming to witness taxpayer dollars being diverted from the taxpayers; especially while inflation continues to rise and becomes a massive problem that we have to suffer through, not the people in charge. Congress needs to realize just how much the American economy is suffering while they pump more money to fund superfluous wars and conflicts. The government has to reevaluate what and who they fund, before the American people become restless due to our worsening conditions on the homefront.