The Pentagon doesn't know what it did with $800 million

The Pentagon.
(Image credit: Ken Hammond/Courtesty of the U.S. Air Force/Getty Images)

An audit report obtained by Politico reveals a division of the Defense Department, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), cannot account for more than $800 million in building expenses. The money is believed to have gone to construction projects, but there is no paper trail. The auditors concluded this is not an isolated incident, but a result of the agency's failure to develop any "reliable way to track the huge sums it's responsible for," Politico reports.

The DLA has an annual budget of about $40 billion, less than 6 percent of the $700 billion in this year's DoD budget. Its audit is part of the first full audit the Pentagon has ever undergone, despite being required by law to submit to an annual audit for decades.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.