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Speaking of Rumsfeld, there was an interesting article in Salon.com yesterday about the U.S. Defense Department's accounting practices:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/09/17/pentagon/index.html
'Over the past several decades -- going back perhaps as far as World War II -- the Pentagon's accounting system has evolved into a bookkeeping knot so rife with contradictions that it is virtually impossible to untangle. Recently, Rumsfeld noted that Pentagon accountants were unable to track an estimated $2.3 trillion in financial transactions for a single year's audit. According to one government study, the Defense Department on average does not know what happens to roughly 30 percent of what it spends.
The breakdown these numbers represent may be even larger than it seems -- if that can be imagined. They raise the question, How can the government truly calculate the amount of money it cannot track? The answer, according to numerous defense-spending analysts, is that it simply can't. At best, such figures are hazy assessments, uncertain clues to a problem so awesome in scale and complexity that it exists beyond the bounds of measurability.
"What is most disturbing to me is that, in program after program, [the Pentagon's] management procedures are so garbled that the General Accounting Office cannot even estimate -- cannot even estimate -- the level of inefficiency," Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said in an address to the Senate last June. "This is a critical knowledge gap when one considers the fact that the Defense Department accounts for about 15 percent of the entire federal budget, and roughly half of all discretionary spending."
It is also a critical knowledge gap when one considers that this autumn, Congress is sure to add approximately $48 billion to the defense budget, bringing the Pentagon's total funding for 2003 to roughly $400 billion, roughly 6 percent more than the average yearly Cold War military spending.' |
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