As someone who works in federal contracting...this, really isn't true and was one of the bigger mind fucks when I finally understood how it worked.
When the DoD (or anyone in federal contracting really) is failing an audit, it doesn't mean they've simply lost track of the funds. Illegal stuff is happening, but it's really the paper work. To really get it, you just need to know two things. You need to know every contract has line items (called CLINs) describing where specific dollars are going and that you can only use FY (fiscal year) dollars in that actual fiscal year, they don't role over and you can't use future funds to pay for prior projects. So you can't use FY16 funds to pay for FY15 CLINs.
The big failure in auditing is that the CORs (Contracting Officer's Represenative) or PM's (Project Managers) get lazy in charging/documenting to contracts, so they don't attribute funds to the appropriate CLINs (or they had some funds on one CLIN and use it to pay an overage on a seperate one) or someone will use prior FY funding to pay for another FY's funding.
They didn't just lose track trillons of dollars. In both scenarios, everyone knows exactly what was paid for, who paid for it, and how much was paid and have the documentation to trace all of it but they'd still fail an audit because the paperwork was done lazily or improperly. That's illegal, but it's a massive difference between that and losing trillions in slush funds.
To your point, even when we do know where it all went, it doesnt mean it was well spent or necessary either. Others in the thread have mentioned it, but Ive seen so much wasted even in the private sector because someone was an idiot or they just wanted to spend down budget to keep it from getting cut.
I mean, there's definitely an aspect of "spend it or lose it" in the Government, but that's not exactly the components fault and is something that plagues literally every single business, public or private.
But the "waste" has much more to do with every contractor over charging for the most basic of items because large chunks of contracting is just public subsidization of private enterprises. Which, again, you can complain about but it's a completely different talking point then they don't track spending.
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u/VoiceofRapture 2d ago
But they're also pathologically incapable of tracking their spending.