The Pentagon has only continued to lose money by the trillions since 9/11, and a recent report analyzing the budgets of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shows that the total is now more than $21 trillion.

The report attributes the missing funds to a series of “unsupported journal voucher adjustments” made to the departments’ budgets. These adjustments are not tied to specific accounting transactions, but they are often included in account summaries to cover for balances between systems that cannot be reconciled.

As The Free Thought Project has reported, not only is it likely that the actual amount of money the DoD and HUD cannot account for is much higher than $21 trillion, due to the fact that researchers did not have access to complete data, but the practice of creating counterfeit adjustments appears to be standard procedure.

“Perhaps even more troubling than the total amount lost is the fact that fraudulent behavior from HUD and DOD seem to be the standard operating procedure. In fact, the accounting for these funds is so poor, that as Reuters notes, the Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) refers to the preparation of the Army’s year-end statements as ‘the grand plug’ — ‘plug’ is accounting jargon for the insertion of made-up numbers.

 

For every transaction, a so-called ‘journal voucher’ that provides serial numbers, transaction dates and the amount of the expenditure is supposed to be produced. The report specifies that the agency has done such a poor job in providing documentation of their transactions, that there is no way to actually know how $21 trillion has been spent.”

When combining the $21 trillion lost by the DoD and HUD with the $9 trillion lost by the Federal Reserve, the grand total stands at more than $30,000,000,000,000 lost by the U.S. government since 9/11. 

When multiplying 60 seconds per minute, by 60 minutes per hour, by 24 hours per day, by the 5,947 days that have elapsed since Sept. 11, 2001, the result is approximately 513,820,800 seconds.

If the U.S. government has lost $30,000,000,000,000 in the 513,820,800 seconds since 9/11, then it has lost a total of $58,386 per second.

For the first time in its history, the Pentagon has announced that the Department of Defense is set to undergo a financial audit. However, as Audit the Pentagon Director Rafael DeGennaro noted earlier this year, the Pentagon has been promising to complete an audit for several years. 

“Over the last 20 years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when an audit would be completed,” DeGennaro told the Guardian. “Meanwhile, Congress has more than doubled the Pentagon’s budget.”