Trillions in the Twilight Zone

The nonpartisan United States General Accounting Office has compiled a report card confirming that we're now over $14 trillion in debt, and nobody knows exactly where all that money has gone. Fourteen trillion -- that’s at least a thousand times more dollar bills than the supposed cosmological age of the universe. "We don't know what we're doing," quipped senator Tom Coburn.

Bernie Madoff, a guy who should know, recently told reporters that the U.S. government is a Ponzi scheme. This GAO report card is proof of that beyond a reasonable doubt.

Looking at federal agencies, the GAO found overlap, duplication, and fragmentation in dozens of areas. There are, for just one small example, 20 different federal programs for the homeless administered by seven different agencies, amounting to an overlap of $2.9 billion. Three different federal agencies administer 18 different food assistance programs to the poor resulting in $62.5 billion in overlap and duplication.

Out of 47 different federal job training and employment programs, 44 of them overlap with other programs, amounting to another $18 billion in waste. Several different federal agencies, and numerous presidential appointees, share activities’ relating to the nation’s biodefense, but none of them has any authority, or owes any responsibility or accountability for the billions they consume.

Meanwhile, over at the Pentagon, the Department of Defense claims that it is just way too big for an accounting audit now; but the secretary of defense is working on the problem so that it might be audit-ready by 2017, six years from now. The GAO report found that the Pentagon has no tracking mechanism for the use of "urgent need" funds, resulting in an estimated $77 billion in overlap waste in just 6 years.

According to CNN, the Defense Department military budget is larger than most countries' entire economy; the Pentagon is the largest office building in the world; and it consumes a gargantuan average of $2 billion to $3 billion taxpayer dollars every business day. Last year, the GAO cited "serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense that made its financial statements un-auditable." "They don't know if they've paid contractors once, twice or not at all. They don't know if they've spent more than they were appropriated."

Contractors engaged in fraudulent dealings and misuse of taxpayer funds received $285 billion over a three-year period; 100’s of millions were overspent in a fund paying benefits to Army service members; and more than a trillion dollars has been spent to purchase weapons systems without a method to determine the full cost breakdown of materials and equipment for the systems. So the Pentagon is unable to manage and control operating and support costs for major weapons systems, including repair and maintenance costs.

If this were just government stupidity and waste, that would be bad enough, but this is not really what I would call stupid or waste. Waste is like leaving good food on your plate to be thrown out in the garbage; it’s leaving the lights on when you go out; contributing to political campaigns. Stupid does not know better.

Someone is getting this money. It’s not going down the toilet. All those billions and trillions are going straight into the pockets of the “political beneficiaries.” There are people driving around in brand new BMW’s because of this graft, and these politicians not only know all about it; they perpetrated it.  

The GAO report: "will make us all look like jackasses," senator Coburn concluded.

Not exactly, I’d say.

In my mind it makes you all look like criminals.