{"id":5326,"date":"2005-09-22T11:12:48","date_gmt":"2005-09-22T15:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5326"},"modified":"2005-09-22T11:12:48","modified_gmt":"2005-09-22T15:12:48","slug":"the-wars-literally-untold-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-wars-literally-untold-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"The war’s (literally) untold costs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just a year ago, John Kerry was criticized repeatedly<\/a> for allegedly exaggerating the overall financial cost of the war in Iraq. Kerry said the war cost in upwards of $200 billion, a claim the Bush administration, citing OMB data, furiously rejected.<\/p>\n

So, was Kerry right? Was OMB wrong? It’s hard to say, exactly — because no one knows<\/a> how much we’ve spent.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon has no accurate knowledge of the cost of military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan or the fight against terrorism, limiting Congress’s ability to oversee spending, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report released yesterday.<\/p>\n

The Defense Department has reported spending $191 billion to fight terrorism from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks through May 2005, with the annual sum ballooning from $11 billion in fiscal 2002 to a projected $71 billion in fiscal 2005. But the GAO investigation found many inaccuracies totaling billions of dollars.<\/p>\n

“Neither DOD nor Congress can reliably know how much the war is costing and details of how appropriated funds are being spent,” the report to Congress stated. The GAO said the problem is rooted in long-standing weaknesses in the Pentagon’s outmoded financial management system, which is designed to handle small-scale contingencies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The entire depressing GAO report is online here<\/a>. If you’re planning to read it, keep a bottle of Maalox handy because it ain’t pretty.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon agreed “generally” with the GAO’s recommendations, and announced it would take “immediate action” to strengthen procedures for reporting war costs, according to a letter from Undersecretary of Defense Tina W. Jonas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, and since Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is known a) for it’s ability to quickly reverse course; and b) improve it’s disclosure problems, I feel better already.<\/p>\n

Post Script<\/i>: By the way, the WaPo article on the GAO report appeared on page A23<\/a>. The NYT, LAT, USAT, and WSJ don’t seem to have run a single word about it. Is it me, or is this fiscal mismanagement — on top of the other billions that have been lost and\/or stolen — a fairly big deal?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just a year ago, John Kerry was criticized repeatedly for allegedly exaggerating the overall financial cost of the war in Iraq. Kerry said the war cost in upwards of $200 billion, a claim the Bush administration, citing OMB data, furiously rejected. So, was Kerry right? Was OMB wrong? It’s hard to say, exactly — because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}