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The world’s largest office building, Four Walls and a Spare, has failed its latest financial audit. And the four before that. Well, all of them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would not say that we flunked,\u201d said DoD Comptroller Mike McCord, although his office did note that the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m not that strong in accounting (wife has a degree, so she explains the hard bits) but she says failing one is a big deal. Five – “would not say we flunked”? Anyone else would.<\/p>\n
After all, the U.S. military has the distinction of being the only U.S. government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit.<\/p>\n
But what did raise some eyebrows was the fact that DoD made almost no progress in this year\u2019s bookkeeping: Of the 27 areas investigated, only seven earned a clean bill of financial health, which McCord described as \u201cbasically the same picture as last year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Pentagon\u2019s most famous recent boondoggle is the F-35 program, which has gone over<\/a> its original budget by $165 billion to date. But examples of overruns abound: As Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jack Reed (D-RI) wrote<\/a> in 2020, the lead vessel for every one<\/em> of the Navy\u2019s last eight combatant ships came in at least 10 percent over budget, leading to more than $8 billion in additional costs.<\/p>\n
And another major overrun is poised to happen soon, according to a recent report<\/a> from the Congressional Budget Office.<\/p>\n
The Navy plans to expand its ship production in an effort to maintain an edge over China, with a particular focus on a new attack submarine and destroyer ship. The Pentagon has proposed three versions of this plan at an average cost of $27 billion per year between 2023 and 2052, a 10 percent jump from current annual shipbuilding costs.<\/p>\n
But the CBO says this is a big underestimate. The independent agency\u2019s math says the average annual cost of this shipbuilding initiative will be over $31 billion, meaning that the Navy is underestimating costs by $120 billion over the program\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
Per Comptroller McCord, the DoD hopes to finally pass an audit by 2027, a mere 14 years after every other agency in the U.S. government blew past<\/a> that milestone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n