Latest / The Fiscal Policy Podcast with Fexingo: Government Budgets, Stimulus, and Public Spending
How the Pentagon Keeps Its Books Secret
The US Department of Defense has never passed a full financial audit. In this episode, Lucas and Luna unpack why the largest single organization in the federal budget can't account for trillions of dollars — and what that means for taxpayers. They focus on the 2025 audit results: the DoD received a disclaimer of opinion for the eighth consecutive year, meaning auditors couldn't verify $3.8 trillion in assets. Lucas walks through the structural problems — legacy IT systems from the 1970s, fragmented accounting across 1,400 separate systems, and the sheer complexity of tracking…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.