On 10 September 2001, the Secretary of Defense declared war … on Pentagon waste.
Responding to internal audits that indicated the Pentagon couldn’t account for up to 25% of its spending, or that there were some $2.3 trillion in transactions (enough for a set of $8K statuary-covering curtains for every man, woman and child in the US) that couldn’t be tracked, Rumsfeld called it “a matter of life and death.”
Until 9-11, the next day, when such unflashy reformist talk went by the wayside, and Rumsfeld and Bush began developing newer, bigger, more deficit-inducing defense budgets.
Given the current economic situation, the need to spend our money wisely — and, yes, our need to spend money on military matters — doesn’t it make sense to try to track down some of the problems with Pentagon’s accounting and money management, before we hand it additional billions of dollars?
(Via Cursor.org)