PENTAGON: "DARN IT, WE MISPLACED $45 BILLION. GIVE US MORE."

An audit of the U.S. military’s spending in Afghanistan has revealed that a whopping $45 billion is unaccounted for.

This is zero percent surprising given the Pentagon’s track record on waste. Scott Shackford at Reason ably explainswhy this is just another reason we do not need to increase the military’s budget—especially without a full audit of the Pentagon:

Remember when we were informed in 2013 that America was giving literal bags full of cash to the office of then-Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai? It really shouldn’t be a surprise at this point that billions of dollars of Pentagon spending within Afghanistan prior to 2010 is unaccounted for. …

Now comes the news that we don’t even really know for certain what the Pentagon has done with $45 billion of $66 billion spent in Afghanistan prior to 2010. Why? Because until then the Pentagon was not required to account for it. The bureaucratic details that led to these circumstances is fleshed out here.

Of course, that “full audit of the Pentagon” part is going to be tricky to achieve. In fact, the audit which discovered the missing $45 billion can’t say much more than that because the Pentagon has not provided the information.
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