{"id":302062,"date":"2025-09-01T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T11:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=302062"},"modified":"2025-08-28T06:08:22","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T05:08:22","slug":"unaudited-power-the-us-military-budget-nobody-controls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/09\/unaudited-power-the-us-military-budget-nobody-controls\/","title":{"rendered":"Unaudited Power: The US Military Budget Nobody Controls"},"content":{"rendered":"

27 Aug 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0The U.S. federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of\u00a0$1 trillion every five months<\/a>. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming\u00a0nearly half of the discretionary budget<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued \u201cGreenbacks,\u201d as Abraham Lincoln\u2019s government did. But I have written on that before (see\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense.<\/p>\n

Under the Constitution, the military budget should not be paid at all, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Expenditures of public funds without a public accounting\u00a0violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7of the Constitution, which provides:<\/a><\/p>\n

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of\u00a0all public Money\u00a0shall be published from time to time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Pentagon\u00a0failed its seventh financial audit<\/a>\u00a0in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets\u2014approximately $2.58 trillion\u2014untracked. From 1998 to 2015, it\u00a0failed to account for $21 trillion<\/a>\u00a0in spending.<\/p>\n

As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. Pres. Dwight Eisenhower warned in\u00a0his 1961 farewell address<\/a>, \u201cIn the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pres. John F. Kennedy echoed that concern,\u00a0warning in 1961<\/a>\u00a0that \u201csecret societies\u201d and excessive secrecy are \u201crepugnant in a free and open society,\u201d threatening democracy by withholding truth from the public. He warned that excessive concealment, even for national security, undermines democracy by denying citizens the facts needed to hold power accountable. \u201cNo expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed,\u201d he said.\u00a0 If untracked billions fund classified programs, citizens are left powerless, governed by a shadow entity answerable to no one.<\/p>\n

Those concerns persist today. On Aug. 13, 2025, Joe Rogan interviewed U.S. Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who leads a House Oversight Committee focused on government transparency regarding various topics, including UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs). Luna said the committee had been formed after she and two other congressmen were denied access at Eglin Air Force Base to information on UAPs provided by whistleblowers. The problem, she said, was that Congress was supposed to represent the public and be an investigative body for it, \u201cand you have unelected people operating basically in secrecy. \u2026 I think this goes all the way back even to JFK, with how they basically have operated outside of the purview of Congress and basically\u2026 have gone rogue \u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Behemoth Without Oversight<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The Department of Defense\u2019s $885.7 billion budget for 2025, approved by the House of Representatives,\u00a0dwarfs the military spending<\/a>\u00a0of China ($296 billion), Russia ($84 billion), and the next eight nations combined. Managing $4.1 trillion in assets\u2014from aircraft carriers to secret drones\u2014along with $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g. personnel costs and pensions), the federal government\u2019s largest agency oversees a military empire spanning\u00a0over 4,790 sites worldwide<\/a>. Yet it operates with minimal oversight.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Chief Financial Officers Act<\/a>\u00a0of 1990 mandated audits for all federal agencies, but the\u00a0National Defense Authorization Act of 2018<\/a>\u00a0delayed the Pentagon\u2019s first department-wide audit to 2018 due to its unwieldy size, its decentralized systems, and its outdated software. The DOD has failed every audit since that time.\u00a0In 2024, it could not account<\/a>\u00a0for its $824 billion FY 2024 budget, with 2,500 new audit issues identified. Of 24 reporting entities, only nine received clean opinions, while 15 received disclaimers due to insufficient data. In fact the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has\u00a0flagged DoD financial management as high-risk<\/a>\u00a0for waste, fraud, and abuse ever since 1995.<\/p>\n

As observed in\u00a0a January 2019 article in Rolling Stone<\/a>\u00a0by Matt Taibbi, openly secret budgets were first legalized in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted that newly created agency from public financial disclosure. The Act stated, \u201cThe sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations related to the expenditure of Government funds.\u201d<\/p>\n

The aim of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was to curb billions of dollars said to be lost each year through fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of public budgets. Despite the mandated audits for all federal agencies, the DoD \u2013 the only major agency without a clean audit \u2013 has received $3.9 trillion in congressionally approved funding since 2018. \u201cEvery year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached,\u201d\u00a0observed federal budgeting expert Lindsay Kosgharian<\/a>, \u201cthey choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023<\/a>, backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Grassley, proposes docking 0.5\u20131% of budgets for audit failures, but the measure has not received a vote.<\/p>\n

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched with promises to strip waste, fraud, and abuse from federal agencies, has conspicuously\u00a0sidestepped the Pentagon<\/a>. A June 2025 article titled \u201cWhy DOGE Was Always Doomed: The Pentagon Problem<\/a>,\u201d points out that the DOGE mission was seriously hampered by the Pentagon\u2019s exemption from auditing:<\/p>\n

In FY\u202f2024, total discretionary spending was about $1.6\u202ftrillion. Of that, the Pentagon alone received $842 billion. In other words, it got more funding than all other departments combined. You read that right:\u00a0one (very special) department received more than all the rest put together.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Funds that are not accounted for divert resources from critical needs like troop readiness, healthcare, and infrastructure. Overbilling by contractors enriches corporations while taxpayers foot the bill. And the lack of transparency erodes public confidence, as Americans struggle with domestic priorities.<\/p>\n

The Missing $21 Trillion: Fraud, Waste or Something Worse?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The Pentagon\u2019s audit failures mask not just inefficiency and waste but pervasive fraud and corruption. Between 1998 and 2015, Inspector General reports show that\u00a0the DoD could not account<\/a>\u00a0for $21 trillion in spending\u201465% of federal spending during that period. For perspective, the entire U.S. GDP in 2015 was $18.2 trillion. In 2023, the agency\u00a0failed to document 63%<\/a>\u00a0of its $3.8 trillion in assets, up from 61% the prior year. A 2015 DoD report identifying\u00a0$125 billion in administrative waste<\/a>\u00a0was suppressed to protect budget increases.<\/p>\n

There is plenty of verified waste to support the case for mismanagement. Military contractors, who receive over half of the Pentagon\u2019s budget, are a major culprit. The F-35 program, managed by Lockheed Martin, was reported in 2021 to be\u00a0$165 billion over budget<\/a>, with $220 billion in spare parts poorly tracked. A 2023\u00a0CBS News investigation<\/a>\u00a0found that contractors routinely overcharged by 40\u201350%, with some markups reaching 4,451%. A\u00a02016 report in the Nation<\/a>\u00a0highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.<\/p>\n

It is no longer even necessary to cover up fraud and corruption by wildly inflated prices. In 2017, former HUD official\u00a0Catherine Austin Fitts collaborated with Mark Skidmore<\/a>, an economics professor at Michigan State University, to document the missing $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments at the DoD and HUD. In a June 2025 article published in Fitts\u2019 journal\u00a0The Solari Report\u00a0<\/em>titled\u00a0\u201c<\/em>Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting<\/a>?,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Dr. Skidmore discussed<\/a>\u00a0how the government responded to the publication of his research with Fitts. Its response was to immediately eliminate the paper trail leading to its covert financial operations. In particular, \u201cPentagon officials turned to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) for advice. Several months later, FASAB posted a new document (FASAB 56<\/a>), which recommended that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds to conceal expenditures if it is deemed necessary to protect national security interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fitts remarked<\/a>, \u201cThe White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury, and announced to every private army, mercenary and thug in the world that we are open for business.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speculation Run Rampant<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In\u00a0a widely-viewed interview by Tucker Carlson<\/a>\u00a0on April 28, 2025, Fitts expressed her belief that the missing trillions had been funneled into classified projects involving advanced technologies, including massive underground bunkers to protect elites from a \u201cnear-extinction event;\u201d and that they were using advanced energy systems and hidden transit networks possibly linked to extraterrestrial tech. She discussed \u201cinterdimensional intelligence\u201d and a secret space program linked to a \u201cbreakaway civilization.\u201d The latter term was\u00a0coined by UFO researcher Richard Dolan<\/a>\u00a0and is defined by Google as \u201ca theoretical, hidden society that operates outside of mainstream civilization with advanced technology, often linked to UFO phenomena and secret space programs.\u201d<\/p>\n

In\u00a0a Danny Jones interview<\/a>\u00a0in May 2025, Fitts alluded to Deep Underground Military Bases (\u201cDUMBs\u201d), perhaps used for \u201cadvanced technology or off-world operations.\u201d Existence of these bases was confirmed two decades earlier by whistleblower Philip Schneider, a U.S. government geologist and engineer involved in their construction. In\u00a0his last presentation in 1995<\/a>, Schneider said there were 131 of these cities connected underground by mag-lev rail, built at a cost of $17-26 billion each.\u00a0According to his biographer<\/a>, Schneider was assassinated in 1996 by a U.S. intelligence agency for disclosing the government cover-up of UFOs and aliens.<\/p>\n

Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Are we dealing with a scenario like that in such Hollywood movies as the 1997 film\u00a0Men in Black<\/em><\/a>, in which hidden forces\u2014human or alien\u2014control our fate?<\/p>\n

The Pentagon\u2019s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office\u00a0(AARO) contends<\/a>\u00a0that no verifiable evidence supports extraterrestrial activity. But other prominent figures support the UFO\/UAP narrative. In 2017, the\u00a0New York Times exposed<\/a>\u00a0the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), said to be a $22 million DoD initiative run by Luis Elizondo investigating UAPs from 2007\u20132012.<\/p>\n

According to BBC News<\/a>, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel\u2019s space security program, claimed in a 2020 interview with the\u00a0Yediot Aharonot<\/em>\u00a0newspaper that the U.S. government has an \u201cagreement\u201d with a \u201cGalactic Federation\u201d of extraterrestrials. He alleged aliens have been in contact with the U.S. and Israel, with secret underground bases where they collaborate on experiments. Eshed claimed the United States was on the verge of disclosing this under President Trump but withheld it to avoid \u201cmass hysteria.\u201d The claims were unverified but provocative.<\/p>\n

In recent years, Congress has increased its focus on UAPs, with high-profile hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, whistleblower\u00a0David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified<\/a>\u00a0that the U.S. possesses \u201cnon-human origin\u201d craft and \u201cdead pilots,\u201d based on classified briefings. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee\u2019s hearing, \u201cUnidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth<\/a>,\u201d featured testimony from Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and former NASA official Michael Gold, who claimed the U.S. possesses UAP technologies and has harmed personnel in secret retrieval programs. Shellenberger alleged that a covert \u201cImmaculate Constellation\u201d program hides UAP data from Congress.<\/p>\n

Some lawmakers, including Rep. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett, continue to criticize Pentagon secrecy and to push for transparency. In May 2024, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, requiring the declassification of all UAP-related documents within 270 days.\u00a0He stated<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This bill isn\u2019t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it\u2019s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people. I\u2019m sick of hearing bureaucrats telling me these things don\u2019t exist while we\u2019ve spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studying them for decades.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Secrecy Undermines Democracy<\/strong><\/h3>\n

With $21 trillion unaccounted for historically, $165 billion in F-35 overruns, and $125 billion in buried waste, the DoD\u2019s financial mismanagement needs urgent reform. Congress is primarily responsible for overseeing the DoD budget, exercising its constitutional \u201cpower of the purse\u201d under Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. So why isn\u2019t it enforcing this mandate?<\/p>\n

The chief excuse given is the need for secrecy for security reasons, but a congressional committee could be given access to the Pentagon\u2019s financial data in closed session in order to exercise public oversight and enforce accountability. Other factors are obviously at play, including political influence, lobbying, campaign contributions from the defense sector, and a lack of penalties for noncompliance.<\/p>\n

To restore accountability, Congress needs to enforce the Audit the Pentagon Act, modernize DoD systems, and investigate contractors profiting from lax oversight. UAP transparency is also critical, whether to debunk myths or uncover truths.<\/p>\n

As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government. The Pentagon\u2019s secrecy and lack of accountability could be shielding anything from contractor fraud to UAP programs and alien alliances. If there is information so secret that even our elected representatives don\u2019t have access to it, who does have access? Is there a secret government above the government we know? Without fiscal transparency and accountability, we can no longer call ourselves a democracy, as JFK warned.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Ellen Brown is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>, an attorney, founder\/chairperson of the\u00a0<\/em>Public Banking Institute<\/a>, and author of thirteen books including\u00a0<\/em>Web of Debt<\/a>,\u00a0The Public Bank Solution<\/a>, and\u00a0<\/em>Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age<\/a>.\u00a0Her articles are at\u00a0<\/em>ellenbrown.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 ellenbrown.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 Aug 2025\u00a0–\u00a0The U.S. federal debt has now passed $37 trillion, growing $1 trillion every five months. Interest exceeds $1 trillion annually. The military outlay, close to $1 trillion, consumes\u00a0nearly half of the discretionary budget.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":179118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[563,354,562,112,95,70],"class_list":["post-302062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-debt","tag-economics","tag-finance","tag-pentagon","tag-us-military","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302062"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":302066,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302062\/revisions\/302066"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}