Audit the Pentagon

One of the benefits of being an extremely powerful lobby in Washington is the ability to live off the taxpayers without ever having to tell the taxpayers what you they with their money. This includes two of the most powerful lobbies in DC: the Fed and the Pentagon.1
In recent years, thanks to Ron Paul, the “Audit the Fed” movement has gained a high profile in Washington and continues to be an election issue. Far less salient, however, is the issue of Auditing the Pentagon. And, unfortunately, like the Fed, the Pentagon is able to quash efforts to make the massive military establishment more transparent and more accountable in its spending. In fact, the Fed’s refusal to submit to any sort of full or meaningful audit has become so intransigent that Senators Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders co-sponsored the “Audit the Pentagon Act of 2015” to force the Pentagon to submit to auditors.

This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on April 5, 2017.