Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Better Than a Black Budget

The Pentagon has no accurate knowledge of the cost of military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan or the fight against terrorism, limiting Congress's ability to oversee spending, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report released yesterday.

The Defense Department has reported spending $191 billion to fight terrorism from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks through May 2005, with the annual sum ballooning from $11 billion in fiscal 2002 to a projected $71 billion in fiscal 2005. But the GAO investigation found many inaccuracies totaling billions of dollars.

"Neither DOD nor Congress can reliably know how much the war is costing and details of how appropriated funds are being spent," the report to Congress stated. The GAO said the problem is rooted in long-standing weaknesses in the Pentagon's outmoded financial management system, which is designed to handle small-scale contingencies.

The report said the Pentagon overstated the cost of mobilized Army reservists in fiscal 2004 by as much as $2.1 billion. Because the Army lacked a reliable process to identify the military personnel costs, it plugged in numbers to match the available budget, the report stated. "Effectively, the Army was reporting back to Congress exactly what it had appropriated," the report said.

The probe also found "inadvertent double accounting" by the Navy and Marine Corps from November 2004 to April 2005 amounting to almost $1.8 billion...


More here in the GAO report, thanks to Defense Tech and Intel Dump.

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.

1 comment:

spocko said...

And again people's inability to understand the difference between a million and a billion is shown by their lack of outrage over this. (of course we all have outrage fatigue, so I understand)

A thousand million.

1,000,000
1,000,000,000

I guess if they don't feel the effects personally it's fine. And if they do start feeling the effects I'm sure that the blame will be shifted to others.

Why the problems with the economy?
"The Weather!"

Asshats.
Makes me want to go work for some group that busts these bastards.
Does anyone like that exist anymore?