But if we cut military, they'd then be much more fiscally responsible and not have to admit that they'd "lost" trillions of dollars that they can't account for every, oh, decade or so.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/politics/us-army-audit-account...

They did not in fact admit they "lost" trillions. It's a fair criticism of their mediocre accounting, however they did not lose trillions of dollars, nor are trillions of dollars unaccounted for. That part isn't even actually being disputed by that ignorant CNN article. Trillions of dollars have not been properly audited, which is not the same as that entire sum simply being magically missing.

That article is rehashing the same bogus premise that has been thrown around for decades. Here's how it works:

https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-8-5-trillion-missing-from-...

https://davidlandy.net/no-the-pentagon-didnt-lose-8-5-trilli...

Basically: within $N trillion in spending, there is a combination of non-audits and accounting irregularities, so therefore CNN throws up a click-bait article claiming the entire amount of spending is unaccounted for.

Pretty idiotic when you consider the sums being claimed vs the known expenditures in question. The premise is: every dollar that wasn't audited was stolen; logically, even if one were to assume theft (etc) happened, it's likely to be a dramatically smaller sum of the whole.

NASA is about 0.5% of federal spending.

The total education spend is 3%.

So you could double spending on education and nasa and still pocket savings...

By cutting the US military by 25%.

Just an example.