With respect to the article it is over a 17 year period. According the the U.S CBO annual spending is around $4 trillion. I'm personally not surprised by these numbers.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52408

They published a bunch of documents, supposedly downloaded from official websites. One of them talks about $6.5T not properly justified in a single year: https://solari.com/00archive/web/solarireports/2017/unsuppor...

Maybe the reports don't say what they claim (I'm no accountant), but if they do, the only other possibility I see is outright fabrication of official documents (with signatures!) by people who aren't exactly anonymous loonies.

https://missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-su...

The entire annual budget right now is ~$4T.. I don't see how $6.5T in a single year is possible.

In my reading of the document, the use of 'adjustment' does not mean that the underlying spending occurred in a single year only that the correction did. So the error could have accumulated over many years.

It might also be write-downs on assets that should have been taken over decades and weren't.

I'd love an actual accountants' (or anyone else's) take on things, but that explains at least how both the total budget number and the adjustment number can both be correct.

Former military finance officer here. I never worked directly w/ the budget shop, but in training they taught us that 'adjustment' was essentially shorthand for 'we can't make these numbers add up.'

Ie,adjustments were less surgically applied line-item corrections, and more bandaids to fix what could easily be underlying math errors.

So if a unit budget was $10mil one year, and could only account for $9mil, they might make $1mil in adjustments to avoid coming in under budget (a kiss of death, as your next year's budget would be cut by however short you were).

Lots of this kind of accounting was made public last yr in the army, so this isn't a total shock:https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army/u-s-army-f...

I would bet accountants still would have a hard time understanding the underlying spending distributions. U.S. spending is a quagmire of illogical and incomprehensible allocations of money. There is so much shoved around for budget purposes to allocate towards government projects that it might never be known what is true spending .

In addition to what the person above stated about the period of time over which this occurred, I'd like to add that I would think the "don't believe everything you read on the internet" file would be filled with statements of the kind made by disreputable sources. This article concerns research done since at least 2015 which has led to an investigation from the Department of Defense. I don't think it should be taken so lightly, yet your comment seems to be trying to sweep this issue under the rug.

At the start of his tenure, Rumsfeld said that the DoD couldn't account for about $2T dollars, so regardless of whether $21T seems plausible, this (first ever!) audit is long overdue.

Those two trillion dollars Pentagon could not account for where for just one year or a longer period? I remember that. It happened right before 9/11 so it was forgotten after the terrorist attack but Rumsfeld went on record saying all that money was missing. Could it be corruption in military is so widespread that we talk about trillions of dollars being siphoned away?

Yeah, and this was announced right before Sep 11, 2001. Funny how it never got more attention...

Same, the article states that the Army alone is missing $6.5 Trillion from 2015...

Roughly speaking that's like 8.8% of the GDP of the planet. That... just doesn't make sense.

The $X trillion missing from Pentagon funds is a meme that pops up every few years (new "journalists" discovering the same news and trying to fill their click quota?).

The money is not missing, just not tracked up to expected accounting standards

Article from 2013: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-waste-specia...

Article from 2002: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/

And you can Google [missing trillions] to find an article on the topic from any given year.

I don't see the reference to the money as "missing". My read is that it's the total of ledger entries made without sufficient supporting justification.

It could be a tank squadron on the books that wasn't removed when it got destroyed (or dismantled) or a whole military base decommissioned but still being depreciated.

This isn't (necessarily) "the Army spent 6.5 trillion too much in one year" nor is it "the Army lost 6.5 trillion".

A single dollar mistakenly accounted upfront can sometimes require at least twice that in corrective ledger entries.

Finally, consider a mistake of the type of over-estimating the value of a capital item by an order of magnitude. The corrective ledger entry would make it look like a huge loss was incurred in a particular year when the reality was much more benign. For the purposes of this report, that corrective entry needs to be supported by specific explanation which was missing.

The military is a black hole for money. Check out the GAO reports on things like expense management.

The US is known to have a massive budget for the defense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...

Yes... Using that link a source... the US lost more than 4 times what every country in the world INCLUDING the US legitimately spent.

Or approximately 1/3 of the of the entire us GDP, compared to the 3% listed.

There are many layers of bureaucracy, and every dollar unaccounted for in every layer counts towards the total. The headline number is much bigger than the number of actual tax dollars spent, but the larger number is indicative of the bogus bookkeeping done throughout gov't agencies: 21 trillion in accumulated errors.

Thought the same thing. So if the conclusion is true why is this also not being picked up by major news outlets? It would be major news

The media don't report much "general" incompetence. If there's a link that this was done as cover for malfeasance or graft then it would be newsworthy.

As it is, it's an eye-glazingly complicated story about government accounting regardless of how big the numbers are. It's hard to imagine the number of hours necessary to fact check the article not to mention finding experts in the field to break it all down.

Oh come on. A publication like the Economist lives for stuff like this, as a story of this magnitude would have lots of knock on effects.

Daily press does tend to go after blow-by-blow stuff but you're selling the media short. The entire Trump collusion thread right now is itself crazy complicated and it's in the news daily.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.