{"id":141079,"date":"2014-10-22T19:36:57","date_gmt":"2014-10-22T19:36:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=141079"},"modified":"2014-10-22T22:00:12","modified_gmt":"2014-10-22T22:00:12","slug":"dont-ask-pentagon-money-goes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/dont-ask-pentagon-money-goes\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Ask the Pentagon Where Its Money Goes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Medea Benjamin<\/em><\/p>\n

President Barack Obama proudly signed the law that repealed the Pentagon\u2019s Don\u2019t Ask, Don\u2019t Tell<\/a> policy, freeing lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans (although not trans people<\/a>) to openly serve in the military four years ago.<\/p>\n

But when it comes to budgeting, the concept lingers on. \u201cDon\u2019t ask us how we spend money,\u201d the Pentagon basically says. \u201cBecause we can\u2019t really tell you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every taxpayer, business, and government agency in America is supposed to be able to pass a financial audit by the feds, every year. It\u2019s the law, so we do our duty. There\u2019s one exception: the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

Year after year, the non-partisan\u00a0Government Accountability Office<\/a>\u00a0(GAO) declares the Pentagon budget to be un-auditable. In 2013, for example, the GAO found<\/a>\u00a0that the Pentagon consistently fails to control its costs, measure its performance, or prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse.<\/p>\n

Congress thankfully, did give the Pentagon a deadline to get itself in better financial shape \u2013 25 years ago. Taxpayers are still waiting.<\/p>\n

The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 requires every federal agency to pass a routine financial audit not once, not twice, but every year.\u00a0All the other agencies do it<\/p>\n

What does the Pentagon deliver instead? Promises. The Defense Department always swears it will conduct an audit \u2013 and then requests five more years to do it.<\/p>\n

How has Congress responded? By doubling the Pentagon\u2019s budget<\/a> between 2000 and 2010. Many members are now railing against \u201ccuts\u201d that will still keep military spending at stratospheric levels over the next decade.<\/p>\n

How bad could things be?\u00a0Well, the most recent scandals may help answer this question.<\/p>\n

In Afghanistan, the Air Force bought\u00a0the Afghan government 20 Italian transport planes<\/a>\u00a0for $486 million. When it found out the planes didn\u2019t work, it crushed them into scrap metal, recouping just $32,000.<\/p>\n

Other examples of disastrous post-9\/11 spending abound. In his new book\u00a0Pay Any Price<\/em>,New York Times<\/em> investigative journalist James Risen reported that more than $1 billion in funds intended for Iraq\u2019s reconstruction may have wound up in a Lebanese bunker<\/a>. Or not. U.S. investigators couldn\u2019t get to the bottom of that one.<\/p>\n

Former Pentagon boss Robert M. Gates<\/a> once described the U.S. military as a semi-feudal system \u2013 \u201can amalgam of fiefdoms without centralized mechanisms to allocate resources, track expenditures, and measure results relative to the department\u2019s overall priorities.”<\/p>\n

Gates also complained that it was nearly impossible to get accurate information and answers to basic questions, such as \u201cHow much money did you spend?\u201d and \u201cHow many people do you have?\u201d<\/p>\n

Congress, charged with oversight, is afraid of stepping on the Pentagon\u2019s powerful toes. The House did, to its credit, pass an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act a few months ago that would require the Pentagon to rank its departments in order of how auditable they are.<\/p>\n

The amendment, however, lacks any penalties for recalcitrant divisions.<\/p>\n

A bipartisan group led by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Michael Burgess (R-TX), and Dan Benishek (R-MI) wants to push the Pentagon further. Their Audit the Pentagon Act of 2014<\/a> (HR5126<\/a>) calls for cutting any \u201cun-auditable\u201d Pentagon operation by one-half of 1 percent. It will be an uphill battle to get majority support for even that slap on the wrist, given how lawmakers have failed to get the Pentagon to carry through with the audit they first demanded more than 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

I find this particularly amazing due to my own personal experience as the co-founder of a small and scrappy feminist peace group called CODEPINK. In 2008, the Internal Revenue Service singled us out for an audit. We underwent a tedious, energy-draining accounting of every dollar spent and complied with every bit of minutiae the IRS requested. It wasn\u2019t fun, but it was our duty and we did it \u2013 and passed. And every year we\u2019re prepared to do it again.<\/p>\n

If CODEPINK can handle an audit, why can\u2019t the Pentagon? It\u2019s high time the Defense Department fulfilled its commitment to account for every taxpayer dollar in its $555-billion budget<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org), cofounder of Global Exchange andCODEPINK: Women for Peace, is the author of Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. Her previous books include Don\u2019t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart., and (with Jodie Evans) Stop the Next War Now (Inner Ocean Action Guide).<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

This piece<\/a> was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Medea Benjamin President Barack Obama proudly signed the law that repealed the Pentagon\u2019s Don\u2019t Ask, Don\u2019t Tell policy, freeing lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans (although not trans people) to openly serve in the military four years ago. But when it comes to budgeting, the concept lingers on. \u201cDon\u2019t ask us how we spend money,\u201d the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-141079","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news","9":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}