Pentagon waste should be a top headline every day

Everyone knows that a lot of money is wasted by the Pentagon, but the amount of this waste is staggering, making most of the fraud reported by the media paltry by comparison. Scot Paltrow puts things in perspective:

The DOD has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known.
Over the past 10 years the DOD has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury is a mystery.
The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or “plugs,” to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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  1. Avatar of Mike Morris
    Mike Morris

    Somebody tell Fox News (sic) that a lot of those people in the military, getting free money from us taxpayers to spend however they want (the takers getting their goodies), are minorities! Now you got a story.

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