With Trump returning to power with his landslide victory he has the chance to complete his overhaul of the defense department.
This is what he did in his first term, the media did not like to report on positive things.
Quote:Trump made it possible to follow the Pentagon’s money
The Pentagon makes up the largest slice of discretionary spending in the federal budget, so it might surprise you that until Trump, no one had conducted an audit of where America’s defense dollars go, and its financial accounting systems were notoriously messy and complicated.
The move: In 2018, the Trump administration for the first time attempted a Defense Department-wide audit. An army of 1,000 outside accountants and 150 personnel from the Defense Department inspector general’s office fanned out to some 600 locations and collected 40,000 pages of financial documents.
The impact: In the end, as widely expected, the Pentagon failed the audit overall; too much paperwork was missing or incomplete. Officials now predict the Defense Department won’t be able to pass a full audit until 2027 at the earliest. But there are bright spots: for example, the first time around the military pay system, an enormous stream of dollars, came back clean. In follow-up audits conducted in 2019 and 2020, meanwhile, a few more defense agencies and military components were added to the clean column.
The upshot: The overall exercise is seen as a milestone in the odyssey to someday verify where all our defense tax dollars are going. What’s more, the audit effort is helping Pentagon managers make their programs more efficient and minimize waste. Efforts to inject more accountability into Pentagon spending are likely to get even more intense during the Biden administration.
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Trump and the defense department. (Read 101 times)
