29 TRILLION dollars missing from Pentagon
Trump calls for audit
IWB,
15 December, 2017
Catherine Austin Fitts breaks down Trump’s investigation into a missing 29 trillion dollars
US
Debt Visualized in $100 Bills
MSU SCHOLARS FIND $21 TRILLION IN UNAUTHORIZED GOVERNMENT SPENDING; DEFENSE DEPARTMENT TO CONDUCT FIRST-EVER AUDIT
Contact(s): Mark
Skidmore, Andy Henion
Earlier
this year, a Michigan State University economist, working with
graduate students and a former government official, found $21
trillion in unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and
Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.
The
work of Mark Skidmore and his team, which included digging into
government websites and repeated queries to U.S. agencies that went
unanswered, coincided with the Office of Inspector General, at one
point, disabling the links to all key documents showing the
unsupported spending. (Luckily, the researchers downloaded and stored
the documents.)
Now,
the Department of Defense has announced it will conduct the first
department-wide, independent financial audit in its history (read the
Dec. 7 announcement here).
The
Defense Department did not say specifically what led to the audit.
But the announcement came four days after Skidmore discussed
his team’s findings on USAWatchdog,
a news outlet run by former CNN and ABC News correspondent Greg
Hunter.
Missing Trillions
Rumsfeld Buries Admission of Missing 2+ Trillion Dollars in 9/10/01 Press Conference
On
September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a press
conference to disclose that over $2,000,000,000,000 in Pentagon funds
could not be accounted for. Rumsfeld stated: “According to some
estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” According
to a report by the Inspector General, the Pentagon cannot account for
25 percent of what it spends. 1 2
The
entire money supply (M3) of the United States is about $14 trillion.
You
can’t be “missing” twice the amount of what actually exists
This report is from RT
$21 trillion of unauthorized spending by US govt discovered by economics professor
The US government may have misspent $21 trillion, a professor at Michigan State University has found. Papers supporting the study briefly went missing just as an audit was announced.
Two
departments of the US federal government may have spent as much as
$21 trillion on things they can’t account for between 1998 and
2015. At least that’s what Mark Skidmore, a Professor of Economics
at MSU specializing in public finance, and his team have found.
They
came up with the figure after digging the websites of departments of
Defense (DoD) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as well as
repots of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) over summer.
The
research was triggered by Skidmore hearing Catherine Austin Fitts, a
former Assistant Secretary in the HUD in the first Bush
administration, saying the Inspector General found $6.5 trillion
worth of military spending that the DoD couldn’t account for. She
was referring to a July 2016 report by the OIG, but Skidmore thought
she must be mistaking billion for trillion. Based on his previous
experience with public finances, he thought the figure was too big
even for an organization as large as the US military.
“Sometimes
you have an adjustment just because you don’t have adequate
transactions… so an auditor would just recede. Usually it’s just
a small portion of authorized spending, maybe one percent at most. So
for the Army one percent would be $1.2 billion of transactions that
you just can’t account for,”
he explained in an interview with USAWatchdog.com earlier
this month.
After
discovering that the figure was accurate, he and Fitts collaborated
with a pair of graduate students to comb through thousands of reports
of the OIG dating back to 1998, when new rules of public
accountability for the federal government were set and all the way to
2015, the time of the latest reports available at the time. The
research was only for the DoD and the HUD.
“This
is incomplete, but we have found $21 trillion in adjustments over
that period. The biggest chunk is for the Army. We were able to find
13 of the 17 years and we found about $11.5 trillion just for the
Army,” Skidmore
said.
The
professor would not suggest whether the missing trillions went to
some legitimate undisclosed projects, wasted or misappropriated, but
believes his find indicates that there is something profoundly wrong
with the budgeting process in the US federal government. Such lack of
transparency goes against the due process of authorizing federal
spending through the US Congress, he said.
The
same week the interview took place the DoD announced that it will
conduct its first-ever audit. “It
is important that the Congress and the American people have
confidence in DoD’s management of every taxpayer
dollar,” Comptroller
David Norquist told reporters as he explained that the OIG has hired
independent auditors to dig through the military finances.
“While
we can’t know for sure what role our efforts to compile original
government documents and share them with the public has played, we
believe it may have made a difference,” Skidmore commented.
Interestingly,
in early December the authors of the research discovered that the
links to key document they used, including the 2016 report, had been
disabled. Days later the documents were reposted under different
addresses, they
say.
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