4% Bureaucrats Face Off Against 42% Military Spending
I guess I don’t entirely understand Elon Musk’s focus on cutting down government spending.
No one who’s been paying attention can possibly fail to understand that accumulating deficits are heading toward a bankrupt America in the next couple of decades. But as any businessman would understand, expenses are only one side of the coin. Income is the other, and it’s a subject for another time.
The Musketeer’s plan to decapitate bureaucracy is a fool’s errand.
In 1950, the United States had a population of 152 million and a federal bureaucracy totaling 2 million. That’s one bureaucrat for every 72 citizens. 75 years later, with a doubled population of 335 million, we have only increased the bureaucracy by 100,000, and a single bureaucrat now serves 152 citizens. Show me any other business that serves twice as many customers with a .0005% increase in labor.
On the other hand.
In 1950, even though the nation was a mere five years past the end of World War Two, our annual military spending amounted to $13 billion, or $87 per capita, based on our population. Ten years later, as President Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency, his parting message was to
“beware the military-industrial complex.” According to Eisenhower, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
75 years later, in 2025, our annual military spending is $886 billion, and costs $2,550 per capita, a total of over $10,000 each and every year, for a family of four. Defense spending per person has increased nearly 30-fold from 1950 to 2025. Thank you, Ike, for the warning. Sorry we failed to listen.
In addition, the Pentagon that spends that money has been unable to pass a financial audit since its inception.
But here are some numbers that will raise the hair on the back of your neck.
Audit Failures: As of 2024, the Department of Defense (DoD) has failed its seventh consecutive audit, unable to fully account for $824 billion in its budget and $4.1 trillion in assets. Added together, that’s approximately $5 thousand billion.
Unsupported Adjustments: “Unsupported adjustments” are a kinder term for “we don’t know where the hell the money went.” Between 1998 and 2015, the DoD reported $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments, indicating discrepancies in accounting entries.
Discrepancies? Like what, trainloads of cash moving out a side door when no one was looking?
Accounting Adjustments: Seems that, if you don’t know what’s going on, changing the name from ‘unsupported’ to ‘accounting’ at least gets it all on a different ledger. In fiscal years 2017 through 2019, the DoD recorded $94.7 trillion in accounting adjustments, a figure that far exceeds its actual budget, suggesting significant issues in financial reporting.
Apparently, within the Pentagon there is a definitive difference between ‘cooking the books’ and ‘burning down the building where the books are stored.’
“According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”
Donald Rumsfeld – September 10, 2001: Ah, yes, that was long ago and faraway, a quote twenty-four years ago by our then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Quickly forgotten in the tragic event the following day, as the Twin-Towers in New York were destroyed by terrorists, much financial and military water has flowed under the bridge since then, not a quart of which has been accounted for.
Never a man to be caught short, Rumsfeld made what was perhaps his best-known quote a few months later. It summarizes my own thoughts on US government:
“Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me because, as we know, there are known knowns, those things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns, which is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.”
Dear god, someone tell Elon that, before he downsizes us into nowheresville.
It is a known known that the Pentagon needs a haircut. It is a known unknown whether it will ever account for its criminal spending. But you’re chasing unknown unknowns (at least for you) and damaging America quite probably beyond repair in the process.
Please, Elon, go back to the private companies you have ruined, or are in the process of ruining.
Leave us alone.
This is not your native land.
We are doing quite well at wrecking it ourselves.
Leave us to do it in peace.