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In the spring of 2017, Mark Skidmore, an economist at Michigan State University who specializes in public finance, heard what he thought was an erroneous, but interesting, claim: that a Pentagon report indicated the Army had posted $6.5 trillion worth of unsupported accounting adjustments for 2015. He was intrigued, though knowing that the Army’s budget was $122 billion, and that the entire 2015 budget for the Department of Defense (DoD) was $565 billion, he assumed it was an error — the figure was surely “billion,” not “trillion,” already a hefty number for an unaccounted-for adjustment. To his shock, upon examining the report himself, he found no such error: the figure was $6.5 trillion, fifty-four times the spending authorized by Congress. To investigate the matter further, Skidmore got in touch with Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and the person who had made the initial claim that had so shocked Skidmore. With the help of two graduate students, Skidmore and Fitts trawled through thousands of government reports to find similar unsupported adjustments. They were shocked by what they found: since 1998, the Pentagon logged unsupported adjustments worth at least $21 trillion, while the Department of Housing and Urban Development registered $350 billion worth.

Missing Money It’s important to understand what Skidmore and Fitts’s findings are, and what they are not. The enormous sums they discuss are what is known as “unsupported journal voucher adjustments,” a more complicated way of saying spending discrepancies lacking an explanation. Whenever there is some kind of accounting discrepancy — for instance, when more money was is than was initially budgeted for — a journal voucher is produced that marks an “adjustment” to the accounting. These vouchers often end up being “unsupported” — in other words, not backed up by receipts and other documentation, or an accompanying explanation of what that money is for and how it was used. But experts are quick to caution against hyperbole when discussing the $21 trillion. “It’s more accurate to say that it’s not properly accounted for than that it’s ‘lost’ or ‘disappeared,’” says Rafael DeGennaro, director of Audit the Pentagon, a group set up to promote its titular concept. “It’s a sign of profound accounting problems,” says Donald Kettl, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. “It isn’t necessarily a sign of illegal spending.” That doesn’t mean it’s not a serious matter. For one, there’s the issue of fraud. Skidmore cites accounting professors Jack E. Kiger and Delwyn D. DeVries who point to a range of high-profile cases where managers used such adjustments for a variety of dishonest purposes, including to hide the diversion of funds and to falsely increase revenue. All of the experts I talked to agreed fraud is a definite possibility in this case, though it’s impossible to know how much of the sum can be attributed to it. Then there’s the often baffling nature of the Pentagon’s accounting and lack of transparency. Skidmore singles out a report that indicated just under $800 billion had been transferred from the treasury to the army in the 2015 financial year, the majority of which, according to a footnote, was “related to budget execution adjustments from prior years” needed to set the ledger right. But as Skidmore told independent news outlet USAWatchdog, documents posted for previous years didn’t suggest this adjustment was necessary. He called the office of the Inspector General, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to get an answer, but couldn’t find anyone who was involved in writing the reports. When he asked if such large sums were a major red flag, he was told that if it was really an issue, there would be a congressional hearing about it, logic that struck him as circular. Then, after he inquired about the reports, the publicly available links on government pages were suddenly disabled (Skidmore, who downloaded copies beforehand, has since re-uploaded them for public viewing.)

Evading Accountability None of this bodes well for the Pentagon’s upcoming audit, the first ever in the DoD’s seven-decade-long history. The push to get the Pentagon audited goes at least as far back as 1990, when Congress passed the Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act, requiring every federal agency to be auditable. And after that, every agency was audited — except the DoD, which year after year managed to avoid it. The closest it got was when the Marine Corps received a clean audit opinion at the end of 2013, only to have that rescinded by 2015. Now an audit has been ordered only four days after Skidmore discussed his findings on USAWatchdog — something Skidmore doesn’t believe was a coincidence. But how successful would an audit even be? If the DoD’s record keeping is this shoddy, could it simply be unauditable? “It may be impossible to untangle all the problems with documenting past expenditures,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “There’s the question of whether the Pentagon is content with impenetrable books that may hide their own shortcomings.” “They’ve had twenty-eight years, and if this was a priority they would’ve already done it,” says Lindsay Koshgarian, program director for the Institute for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project. Donald Kettl is more optimistic, if only slightly. “The Pentagon’s record keeping is auditable — but at a huge price,” he says, pointing to an estimate that the enterprise may end up costing as much as $847 million without producing a clean audit. All of this is profoundly frustrating for Koshgarian, whose work focuses on how decades of gargantuan defense spending have impacted much-needed investment elsewhere. “The debt and deficit each year is used to argue against social spending,” she says, while pointing out that many such deficit hawks are also actual hawks, calling for ever larger military budgets. “This is why in America we can’t afford all sorts of things — a universal health care system, a more honest jobs program.”