{"id":297298,"date":"2017-03-02T18:46:26","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T17:46:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=297298"},"modified":"2017-03-02T18:46:26","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T17:46:26","slug":"trump-boosts-wasteful-department-reduces-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/trump-boosts-wasteful-department-reduces-others\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Boosts Most Wasteful Department, Reduces All Others"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric<\/span> Zuesse<\/p>\n

On February 27th, Reuters headlined\u00a0\u201cTrump seeks ‘historic’ increase of 9 percent in U.S. military’s budget\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and reported that “Trump will ask Congress to boost Pentagon spending in the next fiscal year by $54 billion in his first budget proposal and slash the same amount from non-defense\u00a0spending.”<\/p>\n

The U.S. Department of Defense is one of the\u00a015 U.S. Cabinet departments<\/a>, the others being: State, Treasury, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs (which is entirely \u2018Defense\u2019-related and so their budget is actually an essential part of America\u2019s military expenditures), and Homeland Security (which is another essential military expenditure).<\/p>\n

In addition, there are 16 intelligence agencies within a federal \u201cblack budget,” whose combined expenditure, when that was reported by the BBC headlining on 30 August 2013\u00a0\u201cUS intelligence agencies\u2019 \u2018black budget\u2019 detailed\u201d<\/a>,\u00a0was \u201c$52.6bn in total for 16 intelligence agencies, according to the files\u201d that had been \u201cdisclosed by leaker Edward Snowden.\u201d As the Washington Post<\/i> had first\u00a0reported it the prior day<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe $52.6 billion ‘black budget’ for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post\u00a0from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and\u00a0operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the\u00a0government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since\u00a02007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals\u00a0set by the president and Congress.\u201d<\/i> In addition, there was reported\u00a0“a separate $23 billion devoted to intelligence programs that more directly support the\u00a0U.S. military.\u201d<\/i> So, a grand total spent on \u2018intelligence\u2019 in that year was $75.6 billion. And, actually, none of it has \u201cbeen subject to public scrutiny.\u201d \u2018Defense\u2019 and \u2018intelligence\u2019 are the only<\/i> portions of the U.S. federal budget that have never \u201cbeen subject to public scrutiny,\u201d as will here be explained.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, 13 May 2014,\u00a0Stars and Stripes<\/i>\u00a0bannered\u00a0\u201cDecades later, military still unable to account for its spending\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and reported:<\/p>\n

The military is still running behind in its decades-long quest to audit its spending and rein in waste, Department of Defense comptrollers testified Tuesday to the Senate.<\/i><\/p>\n

Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps financial managers will be unable to fully meet a midpoint deadline set by the secretary of defense this year for mandated accounting benchmarks. Meanwhile, \u201cserious continuing deficiencies\u201d remain in the accounting efforts, according to a Government Accountability Office report issued Tuesday.<\/i>
\nNearly three decades after U.S. taxpayers gasped over $640 toilet seats and other Cold War military waste, the Department of Defense remains the last federal department still unable to conduct a financial audit despite laws passed in the 1990s that require the accounting.<\/i><\/p>\n

Trillions of dollars are being poured down, into \u2018Defense\u2019 (including aggressions such as the invasions of Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.) and into \u2018intelligence\u2019 (including the false \u2018intelligence\u2019 that was used to \u2018justify\u2019 those invasions), and yet none of it is at all accountable to the public; it\u2019s merely being paid to U.S. corporations by the \u2018representatives of the public\u2019, and will now soar even more, while everything else (suposedly except Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) will get slashed, as being what supporters of the military-industrial complex call \u201cwaste, fraud, and abuse\u201d in all Departments but their own. (They never call \u2018defense\u2019 and \u2018intelligence\u2019 expenditures that.)<\/p>\n

On 26 July 2016, the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Defense issued its study,\u00a0\u201cArmy General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported\u201d<\/a>, and reported:<\/p>\n

We determined whether adjustments made to Army General Fund (AGF) data during the FY 2015 financial statement compilation process were adequately documented and supported. \u2026 The Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management & Comptroller) (OASA[FM&C]) and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis (DFAS Indianapolis) <\/i>did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter journal voucher (JV) adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend JV adjustments1\u00a0made to AGF data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation<\/i><\/b>. \u2026 In addition, DFAS Indianapolis did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System\u2011Budgetary (DDRS-B), a budgetary reporting system, removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during third quarter FY 2015. \u2026 As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and yearend financial statements were unreliable and <\/i>lacked an adequate audit trail<\/i><\/b>. Furthermore, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.<\/i><\/p>\n

The present reporter had headlined little more than a month ago on January 15th<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0\u201cThe Thorniest Policy-Question That President Trump Will Face\u201d<\/a>,\u00a0and I opened:<\/p>\n

A decision must be made at the start of Donald Trump\u2019s Presidency on one issue, which will shape both his foreign and domestic policies, and so his entire Presidency.<\/i><\/p>\n

Mark Strauss,\u00a0<\/i>the Editor of the\u00a0Bulletin of Atomic Scientists<\/i><\/a>, headlined on 8 September 2014,\u00a0<\/i>“Nukes Are Cannibalizing The U.S. Defense\u00a0Budget\u201d<\/i><\/a>, and he raised the question of why nuclear forces are \u201ccannibalizing the U.S. defense budget\u201d now\u00a0decades after the end\u00a0of the Soviet Union and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance and its communist dictatorial ideology.<\/i><\/p>\n

No American President will be able significantly to improve the U.S. economy who fails to\u00a0reverse\u00a0this cannibalization by U.S. nuclear-forces advocates and contractors (who get trillions of dollars from this nuclear-weapons business).<\/i><\/p>\n

President Trump has made his decision on this. He will be spending vastly more on America\u2019s nuclear bombs and bombers, in his promised \u2018war against radical Islamic terrorism\u2019; and yet, supposedly, he\u2019s on the anti<\/i>-terrorist side of that war, the same side of it as is Russia, who is obviously his real target (where else are our nuclear forces targeted?), now that he has actually won the White House. Some people call him \u2018Putin\u2019s puppet\u2019, but is Trump actually the military-industrial complex\u2019s puppet? Was he fooling us, all along, to trust his saying that he wanted to cooperate with Russia instead of to target Russia? Are we already not wasting too much on \u2018Defense\u2019?<\/p>\n

Osama bin Laden\u2019s former bag-man who personally collected every one of the milliondollar-plus cash donations that funded Al Qaeda, said \u201cwithout the money of the \u2014 of the Saudi \u2014 you will have nothing\u201d<\/a> of Al Qaeda. He named among those donors from whom he had picked up such a cash donation, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, the Saud family\u2019s Ambassador to the U.S. on 9\/11, whom the \u2018missing 28 pages\u2019 in the official 9\/11 report documented had been regularly paying tens of thousands of dollars personally to at least two of the 15 Saudis who were among the nineteen 9\/11 terrorists<\/a>, and yet President Trump is targeting Russia\u2019s ally Iran \u2014 the Sauds\u2019 foe \u2014 as being the source of that problem \u2014 Trump agrees with Obama on that, which also isn\u2019t what seemed to have been Trump\u2019s views prior to the November 8th<\/span><\/span> election.<\/p>\n

So, this is why the non<\/i>-\u2018defense\u2019 half of the U.S. government will need to be cut by around 9% \u2014 it\u2019s where the \u2018waste, fraud, and abuse\u2019 is in the federal budget, even though the \u2018Defense\u2019 Department is the only one of the 15 federal Departments that cannot even be audited.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s Presidency is now set clearly onto its path. Whatever else happens now cannot change the course of his Presidency. Finally, the answer is clear as to whether he will be a great President, a mediocre President, or an atrocious President. He is finally committed, publicly, to his path<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And, on February 25th, the Democratic Party also committed itself finally<\/a>, to whether it is on the path that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had established, or instead on the path that Bernie Sanders had been trying to establish.<\/p>\n

Finally, things are clear, about the path that America is on. It\u2019s on the Sauds\u2019 path.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric<\/span> Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse On February 27th, Reuters headlined\u00a0\u201cTrump seeks ‘historic’ increase of 9 percent in U.S. military’s budget\u201d\u00a0and reported that “Trump will ask Congress to boost Pentagon spending in the next fiscal year by $54 billion in his first budget proposal and slash the same amount from non-defense\u00a0spending.” The U.S. Department of Defense is one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-297298","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}