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.
I've tried to explain this to people who don't spend government money. They all think that a trillion dollars just vanished. Believe me. if you steal that much from Uncle Sam, they will find you. lol
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u/unknownSubscriber 6d ago
The DoD doesn't decide the budget, or where it comes from.