Why the Pentagon Keeps Failing Audits
- Kevin Lankes
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/L1adZn9w6Lc
You may have heard that the Pentagon just failed its eighth consecutive audit at the end of 2025. But good news, they’re aiming to pass one of these dang things by 2028, so don’t you worry. In the meantime, because we have a lot of time until then, let’s take a look at what’s going on here.
Because from the outside, you’re probably thinking that this is a prime example of the failure of government processes and the result of overwhelming corruption and red tape bureaucracy. But you would actually not be correct in that assumption. Or at least not entirely.
You see, there are a couple of key things going on here. For one thing, the Department of Defense is enormous. Not too long ago, it was the largest employer in the world. The whole world. Like how you go and get a job at a place, well most people who worked anywhere in the world worked for the United States Defense Department. It’s now the second-largest employer in the world, overtaken only by India’s Defense Ministry. There are so many files, and transactions, and transfers, and invoices, and paperwork that I mourn for the generations of trees that we’ve lost in nature’s ongoing struggle against America. Even though things are digital now and have been for some time, not everything is, and that doesn’t guarantee that your file systems make any sense even if they are digital.
Picture yourself at work looking through the file folders and sighing over and over again in frustration and just straight up confusion. That can’t just be me. It’s like every place I’ve worked. Things we’ve decided to do in meetings and the executive team asks for in deliverables, well randomly I’ll just be looking through this ghost town of endless discarded folders and low and behold, there’s that exact thing we just decided to do. Unbeknownst to us, someone already did the same thing years ago and here are its smoldering remains buried deep in the darkest layer of the company drive.
It’s madness at a regular company, I can’t imagine what it’s like in a workplace the size of a government. And the Defense Department is made up of numerous different workplaces, commands, units, ships, bivouacs, whatever. It’s actually kind of impressive that we’ve ever had any auditors with the courage to even try to keep all that straight.
The other key thing that’s really the main takeaway I want you to come away with, is that the Pentagon failing audits isn’t about the Department of Defense not keeping its records straight. Failed audits here aren’t about corruption or waste. I know that’s hard for some people to believe that, but look at the evidence. We’ve just been through a fire sale of waste-finding given to the highest bidder, which happened to be Elon Musk, so he could comb through all our super-secret files and grab everybody’s information in a supposed attempt to save trillions of dollars by cutting waste. And they didn’t do that. There was no waste happening, surprise. I mean some of us weren’t surprised. And I’m about to do a video here about why that is, where I talk about the myth that the private sector is more efficient and effective than government, because spoiler, it’s not.
But the thing I want you to take away from this is that the failure is not caused by corruption and waste. The Pentagon fails its audits because auditors can’t 100% track down all the evidence to say that the paperwork the department filed is completely accurate. Because it’s just too much to track down right now.
In the future, which is what the 2028 goal is all about, officials at the Department of Defense have said they want to make things easier to keep track of, and to do that they’re planning an effort to modernize their data collection and storage systems, and firmly create cohesive, standardized practices across departments and defense infrastructure.
It’s like you’re Walmart, say. And like, an eighth of your work force is on a boat, or a couple boats, and they do things their own way, and then another eighth is in one office doing like holiday planning for product displays, and they do things their way, and another eighth is the automotive department, and they live on an offshore oil barge in the arctic for some reason, and they will only handwrite their notes and communicate via sea otter. I’ve never worked at Walmart, so I hope it’s not actually like that. But the Pentagon is. Plus, they literally have people in space. I think the space people probably have the best record keeping, but then there’s like the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, and nobody has any idea what they’re doing with that thing, all of its missions are totally classified. So how do we keep that straight? How do independent auditors even get a handle on spending and transactions inside the 80 billion dollar black budget, for instance? If anyone watching this has any details about how we audit extremely classified projects for fiscal accountability, I think America would definitely love to know that, so please chime in. And please like the video and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more of what I’m doing here.
There aren’t any actual problems when the Pentagon fails an audit. Like, the auditors for private companies are the government, and they hold companies accountable with the authority vested in the government. But if the government fails an audit? Hmm. I think it’s complicated from an ethics standpoint, but it’s kind of immune from any practical consequences. Normally, you’d be worried that specific operations within a company might be either hampered by a lack of control over the finances, or you’d be worried about resources going to waste or being misappropriated or stolen. But, again, and fortunately, neither of those things seem to be happening with government finances. I think there’s definitely a bureaucratic delay here and there, but that’s to be expected at any large organization, and this is an endlessly massive one. You get a lot of people together and you force them to do things in specific ways, then they’re going to put things off, and then if those specific ways are actually numerous and they don’t all match up, then they’re going to really put things off and not want to do them at all.
I think if we were genuinely seeing the level of fraud and corruption that you hear about from Republicans when it’s time for them to fire up their election campaigns against an incumbent Democrat, then we’d really want to band together as a society and make sure that something is done to fix this. But at this point, we know what the issues are, and planning has been orchestrated and systems are in place to deal with the problem.
It’s sort of like you’ve gone to the doctor, and you’ve diagnosed with something. And it’s not bad, you just need to go home and exercise more. And you go, well I don’t want to. That’s where we are with the Department of Defense. We have millions of people who just don’t want to, because things are working fine, and the things that aren’t can be tolerated enough that there’s not a lot of immediate motivation to change anything. But for the rest of us looking in, we’re like, man Department of Defense, you should really think about hopping on the treadmill once in a while.
And that’s what oversight committees are in place to do. That’s what happens next. The Pentagon goes into a remediation phase where they try to address the areas where auditors flagged things where they want to see improvement. But again, you know, there’s no real pressure to do anything any better.
Don’t get me wrong, this is definitely something we want to have real accountability around. It seems like it’s just a matter of firming up processes and paperwork, and I for one, am not really at all worried about that. It doesn’t put us or anyone in any danger right now, and I think we can wait for the remedies that are moving forward as we speak before we storm the gates and like install zombie lord Clippy as the Chief Budget Officer of the United States government. You know, as much as I think everyone would like that. Instead, we’re just going to wait and see if they can pass an audit in 2028. I’m sure I’ll see you before then. I hope that you’ve been keeping better financial records than the Pentagon. It’s probably not hard to do.
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