The Pentagon is the largest U.S. federal agency and is responsible for
roughly half of the government's annual discretionary spending, with its yearly budget approaching $1 trillion despite long-standing concerns about the department's inability to account for vast sums of money approved by lawmakers and presidents from both major parties.
The latest financial
assessment published Friday by the Defense Department's inspector general office estimates that the Pentagon has $4.1 trillion in assets. It is the only major federal agency that has never passed a clean audit, as required by law.
"Of the 28 reporting entities undergoing stand-alone financial statement audits, nine received an unmodified audit opinion, one received a qualified opinion, 15 received disclaimers, and three opinions remain pending," the Pentagon
said Friday.
Since the department's first failed audit in 2018, Congress has authorized
trillions of dollars in additional military spending. According to the Costs of War Project, more than half of the department's annual budget "is now spent on military contractors" that are notorious for overbilling the government.
"The Pentagon's latest failed audit is a great signal to the incoming administration for where they can start their attempts at slashing government spending," Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Common Dreams. "Instead of gutting veterans' benefits or the Department of Education as planned, they should start with the one major government agency that has never passed an audit, the Pentagon."
Progressive watchdogs and lawmakers have
long cited the Pentagon's failure to pass a clean audit as evidence of the department's pervasive waste and fraud. The Pentagon buried a 2015 report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste out of concern that the findings would be used as a justification "to slash the defense budget," as The Washington Postreported at the time.
Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
introduced an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act that would have required the Pentagon to return a portion of its budget to the Treasury Department's general fund as a penalty for failing audits.
"Year after year the establishment on both sides of the aisle have prevented these amendments from receiving a single roll call vote," Warren Gunnels, Sanders' staff director,
wrote on social media over the weekend.
This story has been updated to include comment from Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project.
