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Which isn't ideal, but easily better than the pentagon that has literally never passed a full audit since they started auditing them in 2018. I'm a huge fan of
by toolz 1y ago
Which isn't ideal, but easily better than the pentagon that has literally never passed a full audit since they started auditing them in 2018. I'm a huge fan of musk's company's, but I don't want my public tax dollars ever choosing winners/losers
- bena 1y agoThe Pentagon will never pass an audit. Some of that money goes into things the auditors do not have clearance for.
- axpy906 1y agoDidn’t they at one point fail to account for Trillions of dollars in their budget? How do you do that? The scale for me is unimaginable.
- ethbr1 1y agoHow many other companies need to fund rebuilding of entire countries? (granted: usually the DoD's fault in the first place...)
- kolbe 1y agoAuditors don't get access to whatever the modern equivalent of this is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Bahamas) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bank_%26_Trust_(Baham...
- jcranmer 1y agoAIUI, the Pentagon failing an audit is essentially akin to most people failing an audit because they can't produce every single paper receipt for everything they've ever purchased. Combine that with the fact that the Pentagon is (I believe) the single largest purchaser on the planet, the fact that much of what it does is compartmentalized in different security buckets, and that the managerial staff tends to be younger than most organizations, and it shouldn't be so surprising that it's persistently in a state of being unable to literally dot every i and cross every t.
- timschmidt 1y ago"September 10th, 2001 then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged to the American public that Pentagon can't account for 2.3 trillion" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWFAs9ffGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWFAs9ffGk
- ceejayoz 1y agoThey use auditors with clearance. I'd imagine certain programs require very specific auditors to supervise them, like how the FISA court works with specific vetted lawyers at times. The more mundane problem is things like "drive that truck over there… drive another one back" often result in the exact location of an asset being unclear fairly frequently.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoYour public tax dollars picked Tesla and SpaceX as winners vs losers, through billions of dollars of subsidies.
- zpeti 1y agoThose subsidies also went to Boing and ULA, who also bid on those contracts. This is such a debunked argument but I guess its undebunkable because its a branch you can hang onto about how the only reason SpaceX exists is the government. Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or Arianaspace in the EU.
- bell-cot 1y ago> Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or ArianeSpace ... Or any of hundreds of other national space programs and companies, in countries which would have been ecstatic to pay 10X the US Govt's "subsidies to SpaceX", to put themselves or their nation's company into SpaceX's current position of utter global dominance.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago[flagged]
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-exploration-technologies-spacex https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/space-explor... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e... | https://archive.is/2025.04.06-135244/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/ https://archive.is/2025.04.06-135244/https://www.washingtonp... https://freebeacon.com/issues/emails-epa-rushed-to-resolve-teslas-million-dollar-bureaucratic-snafu/ https://freebeacon.com/issues/emails-epa-rushed-to-resolve-t... “Who is John Galt?” /s He is Schrödinger's Entrepreneur: a self made man when the ego and cult calls for it, but a scrappy startup founder just trying to save the world and get to Mars when desperate for government or Capital market support and intervention.
- addicted 1y agoThey are crowing about increasing the Pentagon’s budget.
- jedberg 1y agoMusk's companies fail their audits too. Tesla can't account for $1.4B of government money they received.
- bpodgursky 1y agoWhy does this matter? Government either gives loans and demands they are paid back, or pays for deliverables. If you have to keep your fingers in the books to feel good about what's happening, it was a badly structured contract.
- jedberg 1y agoBecause it's my money and I want to know how it's being spent, whether it's the government or a private company spending it. I had no choice in where that money went, so I need transparency on how it's being spent. That's why every government contractor has to report what they are doing with their government money.