[Tylast]

Trillions of dollars are NOT missing…never were. With 34 colors of money, subdivided by Fiscal Year (FY), and where the RDT&E is further divided by 8 budget activities (each also divided by FY), it becomes a task impossible to tell congress (who actually created this insane level of fiscal sub-division in the first place) that every single dollar was spent according to their scheme.

Think about it, there is not a single off the shelf enterprise accounting system designed to accommodate even a fraction of this maniacal minutia.

Note that the cited list didn’t account for JIEDO appropriation type (which also had a FY component) which was prevalent over the past 20 years, but is now defunct.

A major part of the problem (save the super fragmented parsing of the funding) is that each service has their own accounting & execution systems. There is NOT a singular DoD system.

https://acqnotes.com/acqnote/acquisitions/appropriation-cate...

https://ndiatvc.org/images/downloads/DAU_Training/dau_color_...

[throwawaylinux]

Nobody could answer the question of what the money was spent on, so it's missing. This is a normal usage of the term, nobody is alleging that someone was walking down the street with a briefcase full of 2.3 trillion dollars and whoops accidentally slipped and threw it into the bushes somewhere but can't find it.

And I'm no accountant but I suspect there could be a reasonable middle ground between accounting for every single dollar spent, and accounting for 2.3 trillion dollars.