Jacobin
Branko Marcetic
01/25/2018
In the spring of 2017, Mark Skidmore, an economist at Michigan State University who specializes in public finance, heard what he thought was an erroneous, but interesting, claim: that a Pentagon report indicated the Army had posted $6.5 trillion worth of unsupported accounting adjustments for 2015. He was intrigued, though knowing that the Army’s budget was $122 billion, and that the entire 2015 budget for the Department of Defense (DoD) was $565 billion, he assumed it was an error — the figure was surely “billion,” not “trillion,” already a hefty number for an unaccounted-for adjustment.
To his shock, upon examining the report himself, he found no such error: the figure was $6.5 trillion, fifty-four times the spending authorized by Congress. To investigate the matter further, Skidmore got in touch with Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and the person who had made the initial claim that had so shocked Skidmore.
