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 .