Staff Reports
Another day, another scandal at the Pentagon. A senior House Republican is calling for an investigation following the Defense Department’s astonishing record of failing its seventh consecutive audit. Representative Pete Sessions from Texas, who happens to chair the House Oversight subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, is demanding answers from the government’s top watchdog. The Department of Defense (DOD), a black hole for taxpayer dollars, has demonstrated its illustrious inability to keep its financial house in order. Perhaps the nation’s most funded agency should have been more concerned with facts than with flying fancy jets.
Sessions highlighted a crucial point: while the Defense Department gulps down nearly half of all federal spending, its record shows an exceptional knack for waste and mismanagement. This financial circus has not gone unnoticed, with the DOD’s assets accounting for a staggering 70 percent of the government’s total physical assets. Yet, for all this funding—topping $900 billion a year—the Pentagon appears as financially stable as a house of cards in a wind tunnel.
The latest audit didn’t just receive criticism; it was slapped with a “disclaimer of opinion,” which is fancy talk for a grand failure. Since the requirement was introduced in 2018, the Pentagon has yet to come close to passing a single audit. It’s like an indignant student getting handed an “F” every year since middle school and wondering why their parents are upset. Sessions is urging Gene Dodaro, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) chief, to make sure the DOD gets its act together. After all, tracking progress on something as essential as a basic audit should not be rocket science, but for the Pentagon, it appears to be exactly that.
House Republican calls on government watchdog to investigate DOD after another failed audithttps://t.co/RZvmjagl7G pic.twitter.com/eUCKidv1p9
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) December 12, 2024
In the spirit of spending cuts, the incoming Trump administration has big plans to tackle the fat in government expenditures, all while the DOD continues to bumble through financial modernization efforts. Mike McCord, the DOD’s chief financial officer, is claiming there’s light at the end of the tunnel, promising that a clean audit is just around the corner—by fiscal 2028. Talk about optimistic! If schools operated at this level of fiscal irresponsibility, they’d be out of business faster than you can say “oversight committee.”
Sessions’ letter to the GAO comes after a disheartening September hearing where the Pentagon’s financial management practically earned a participation trophy— which was mostly failing grades. The GAO has classified the DOD’s financial systems as “high risk” due to ongoing deficiencies in their processes and reporting. It’s remarkable but tells a bleak story: the only major agency in the U.S. government to have never passed an audit is the Department of Defense, and it seems like they’re aiming to keep that embarrassing tradition alive. Meanwhile, taxpayers continue to foot the bill. Wouldn’t it be nice to see this massive organization manage its money as well as it manages to spend it?
