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Comment by pupdogg | Hacker News Reader

Whatever happened to the $2.3T (trillion) dollars that went missing as per Donald Rumsfeld's speech on September 10, 2001? I think we forgot to follow-up on this question...leading ourselves into greater debt year-after-year since then.

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/

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Trillions of dollars are NOT missing…never were. With 34 colors of money, subdivided by Fiscal Year (FY), and where the RDT&E is further divided by 8 budget activities (each also divided by FY), it becomes a task impossible to tell congress (who actually created this insane level of fiscal sub-division in the first place) that every single dollar was spent according to their scheme.

Think about it, there is not a single off the shelf enterprise accounting system designed to accommodate even a fraction of this maniacal minutia.

Note that the cited list didn’t account for JIEDO appropriation type (which also had a FY component) which was prevalent over the past 20 years, but is now defunct.

A major part of the problem (save the super fragmented parsing of the funding) is that each service has their own accounting & execution systems. There is NOT a singular DoD system.

https://acqnotes.com/acqnote/acquisitions/appropriation-cate...

https://ndiatvc.org/images/downloads/DAU_Training/dau_color_...

Nobody could answer the question of what the money was spent on, so it's missing. This is a normal usage of the term, nobody is alleging that someone was walking down the street with a briefcase full of 2.3 trillion dollars and whoops accidentally slipped and threw it into the bushes somewhere but can't find it.

And I'm no accountant but I suspect there could be a reasonable middle ground between accounting for every single dollar spent, and accounting for 2.3 trillion dollars.

> "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.

I think this is related to the very long DoD audit process, and there's a difference between being unable to track those dollars and them being missing or stolen or inappropriately used.

Notably, it took until about 2017 for annual audits to actually start at DoD, and AFAIK, they have yet to have a 'clean' audit where all/substantially all assets and spending is accounted for, although it seems like progress is being made. This isn't necessarily unexpected as the organization wasn't built with auditing as a requirement and it takes some time to retrofit that into a large organization. Congressional oversight is powerful, but persistant focus is hard to come by and is really needed on something like this.

The article makes it pretty clear that the $2.3T figure is about efficiency, sloppy accounting and diffuse accountability. It’s not like there was $2.3T cash in a van that got stolen.

Sloppy accounting on trillions of dollars. Ok, so how much was stolen?

But as a matter of probability and human greed, some people understood the system and invisibly stole from it. How much of the money was mismanaged vs how much was stolen is debatable.

Agreed! But if look at the timing of it, the efficiency, accounting, and accountability seemed to be worsened 6x times more to date.

Well, sure, are you going to confirm to accounting norms when you're not required to and you've got more urgent matters to attend to? Especially if you're in an institution that has ignored accounting norms for many many years?

This exact question has been making the rounds. I suspect it's some meme amongst conspiracy peddlers and conversation de-trailers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pldkd4/what_...

Trump said the troops stole it:

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/trump-us-troop-stole-...

I think you're confused. This is money before Iraq ever came into the picture (post 9/11). This is money that was reported "unaccounted for" 1 day prior to 9/11.

That article makes no reference to Rumsfeld's 9/10 speech. This is just a generic Trump is bad article.

It's directly linked to the same sum discussed by Rumsfeld.

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