Mrantala said: You can't fund secret government projects (and no I'm no going to conspiracy right now) such as advanced weapon developments, new aircraft/spacecrafts designs, etc with PUBLIC funds. If you do that, you have disclose what they are and how much their costing, and they don't want to do that. Click to expand...

They can do that, they do it, and they don't have to disclose it.Fold them up into vaguely named budget lines that just say things like "other procurement" without any elaboration or exist as code names with perfunctory descriptions. There's also two versions of the budget: the declassified one that you can get from any .gov and the classified ones that the White House submits and Congress approves behind closed doors where there are break-outs for the classified work. And not everyone in Congress gets to see that one either.None of this is speculative or conspiratorial. They do exist and there was a minor flap in 1990 when Aviation Week discovered a budget a few years earlier had inadvertently included an actual break-out for something that we now generally accept to have been the B-2 Spirit* when it was lurking in the black budget between 1979 and 1989. It had spent those years under the vague and ambiguous line of "Other Production Charges" in the Aircraft Procurement numbers. That code means something, as the Navy (for instance) has the same line. However, at the time, they had a budget of just $50 million while the Air Force was at $3.5 billion. The Navy, I would wager, would be much more forthright in telling you what they were doing. The Air Force might have said something similar to what the Navy says, but their numbers are a gigantic one that seems wildly out of place compared to what the Navy said. There's a big old lump of black project sitting right out in the open. But the error with the roll-up only happens in one budget in that decade. Simple math over the period from 1979 to 1989, even without the error, would have told you they were paying forexpensive that hadn't seen the light of day.Another example is no one knows (I meandoes) what the heck the NRO is spending all its money on. They're buyingand generally we can believe some of it goes towards satellites. What they are and how much they cost is another thing. So when they show up at NASA saying "hey you guys want these optics from project that failed? You could use them for more telescopes." and NASA looks at literally billions of dollars in hardware that got thrown in the trash, more or less, it is entirely consistent with how much the NRO gets and what their mission is. But virtually no one knew they had all this stuff laying around.* I say generally accept because the Advanced Tactical Bomber (the B-2), Senior Trend (the F-117), and the Advanced Tactical Fighter (the F-22) were all black projects at the time. The peak and decline of funding in the Other Production Charges item and the transition into the declassified B-2 funding implies it was a single aircraft type.