Putting the life back in science fiction

I saw this last night and decided it was too big, literally, to ignore.

The US Army currently reported that in FY 2015 it had $6,500,000,000,000 (that’s $6.5 trillion) in spending on an annual budget of $122,000,000,000 ($122 billion), or spending 54 times more than its budget.  Worse, between 1998 and 2015, the Army and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) somehow racked up $21,000,000,000,000 in spendings.  Here’s a link to the press release about Michigan State Professor (Mark Skidmore), who broke the news (although it had been mentioned by the government), here’s the article on it in Forbes.  Here’s the documents.  As noted in both articles, when Prof. Skidmore started probing these expenditures, documents on them, which had been publicly posted at the Office of Inspector General at the DoD, for some reason all the links started disappearing.  It’s a good thing Skidmore had already copied the documents and is now posting them online.  Oh, and this might potentially be why the DoD is undergoing its first agency-wide independent financial audit ever (press release).  I haven’t looked at what HUD is doing, if anything.  Continue reading →