Former military finance officer here. I never worked directly w/ the budget shop, but in training they taught us that 'adjustment' was essentially shorthand for

Former military finance officer here. I never worked directly w/ the budget shop, but in training they taught us that 'adjustment' was essentially shorthand for 'we can't make these numbers add up.' Ie,adjustments were less surgically applied line-item corrections, and more bandaids to fix what could easily be underlying math errors. So if a unit budget was $10mil one year, and could only account for $9mil, they might make $1mil in adjustments to avoid coming in under budget (a kiss of death, as your next year's budget would be cut by however short you were). Lots of this kind of accounting was made public last yr in the army, so this isn't a total shock:https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army/u-s-army-fudged-its-accounts-by-trillions-of-dollars-auditor-finds-idUSKCN10U1IG https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army/u-s-army-f...