Somehow, the Department of Defense has gone all of its seven decades without an audit. Now that one has finally been conducted, the auditors found rampant misspending, inaccurate inventory accounts and a failure to meet cybersecurity standards.
The Pentagon won't say just how much money it discovered it was wasting, but they did say that the $559 million audit will more than pay for itself, to give a sense of how big the problem is.
The Pentagon hopes that this audit will give Congress the confidence to increase the military's budget moving ahead, but the results should mean the opposite. The Department of Defense needs to better manage the money it has allocated before we give it more.
Besides, the U.S.'s defense budget is already larger than the next several countries' combined, and the majority of that money goes to corporations, not the troops. It's time to say enough is enough — Congress, stop rubber stamping bloated defense spending.
