This is either a misconception based on lack of understanding of the situation and how bidets and such work, or misleading, and requires some corrections.
1. To “misplace” is to put in the wrong place and be unable to find temporality. The Pentagon didn’t “misplace” the money- the money was spent and they could not ACCOUNT for how. In other words, they load for things and then when asked couldn’t say what it was spend on. They “misplaced” the “receipts”- for example it is the difference between you not doing your taxes and you just losing $50,000 or $200,000 or whatever you earn and such each year.
2. This WAS talked about again. Quite a bit. And then some years later, they released a statement with accounting. Again, with our tax example, it takes many private individuals some time to do their personal taxes, let alone if they are audited, and most peoples finances are infinitely less complex and involve far less money than this. If I asked you to provide accounting for every penny you had earned or spent over a year, what you’d spent or bought with it all- it might take you some time too if you didn’t know at that moment. Of course a government is expected to do this and should be ready to. So went went wrong?
3. At the time this was going on, Donald Rumsfeld actually explained it- it’s important To note that being able to explain why it happened doesn’t make it “ok,” but in the context of the statement it isn’t like they just shrugged and no one cared.
The Pentagon was using MANY different systems for accounting and book keeping which were often obsolete, incompatible, or isolated. So an individual Department etc. wishing the pentagon could generally provide full accounting, they didn’t have a way to look at ALL those departments at once and provide an overview for ALL of them. This is part of why it took so long for the pentagon to issue the final report. They had to manually gather the information and they underwent a lengthy process to upgrade their systems which was better but still not super great.
4. It was not $2.3 trillion. All we have to do to know it wasn’t $2.3 trillion is to look at publicly available information. The entire Pentagon budget wasn’t that much. They couldn’t “misplace” that much money without borrowing multiple times their own budget and then losing all the money somewhere unknown. In 2022 the Pentagon got a $30 billion dollar increase… to $773 billion. 20 years ago their budget was not what it is today- so it isn’t really even practical for them to “lose $2.3 trillion” to start with.
5. Why $2.3 trillion? Well… this one requires the tiniest understanding of accounting or at least basic practical math. If you have $100 and you lend your brother who has $0 your $100, you now have $0 and your brother has $100. You still are OWED $100 until your brother pays you back, so at some point you’re going to need to collect that money or write it off or else you’ll still have $100 you need to account for.
Now on your brothers side, they have $100.
Now your Mom comes along and wants to know how you both have been sprinting your money and figure out the finances for the family. If all she knows is you got $100 from part time jobs and that your brother has $100 in their wallet- your mom might assume you and your brother have $200. She needs that accounted for.
That accounting is pretty easy. $100 came in to the house, you lent it to your brother, there is only $100 to account for and it is accounted for. The money was never misplaced as you knew where it was and it was where it was intended to be. Now if you scale up those transactions and you multiply them so you’re tracking hundreds of thousands of them, and you are dealing with more complex transactions and chains of money- it starts to become more difficult to easily tell where the money went or even how much money there is to count! So the oft cited $2.3 trillion dollars includes money being counted multiple times because as stated earlier- you’re looking at individual reports. You see one department had money that is gone but not where it went, another had money come in but not where it came from and so forth…
So you can count the same money multiple times and that’s sort of the point of accounting in large part- to be able to make sense of where it’s going and coming in complex finances so you know how much is actually being spent on what. If you can’t account for the money (the original problem) then you can’t actually say how much money there even is or was. In the end after they finalized the report- there was substantial duplication and it ended up that the amounts being discussed and ACTUALLY needing accounting for were closer to $90 billion. Still a large number and pretty unacceptable for government finances- but WAY less than $2.3 trillion.
TL:DR- it was NOT $2.3 trillion or anywhere close. It was NOT misplaced. It WAS spoken of again several times- first they explained the issue and then they eventually issued a report after the issue had been somewhat corrected. It was largely due to issues with the software and their ability to combine the accounting information from multiple departments.
Most people likely won’t read or follow along with my longer version above and that is basically why the misconception exists, and why many of these misconceptions exist. People often lack either or both the attention spans and/or the fundamental knowledge base to digest anything that doesn’t happen at the instant they are interested and is more complex than can be explained to a lay person in 20 words or less. Peoples interest often stops at criticizing- after that they don’t actually care as much about the facts as it usually takes more energy and time to get the facts than to criticize based off a 10 second blurb that upset them.
1. To “misplace” is to put in the wrong place and be unable to find temporality. The Pentagon didn’t “misplace” the money- the money was spent and they could not ACCOUNT for how. In other words, they load for things and then when asked couldn’t say what it was spend on. They “misplaced” the “receipts”- for example it is the difference between you not doing your taxes and you just losing $50,000 or $200,000 or whatever you earn and such each year.
The Pentagon was using MANY different systems for accounting and book keeping which were often obsolete, incompatible, or isolated. So an individual Department etc. wishing the pentagon could generally provide full accounting, they didn’t have a way to look at ALL those departments at once and provide an overview for ALL of them. This is part of why it took so long for the pentagon to issue the final report. They had to manually gather the information and they underwent a lengthy process to upgrade their systems which was better but still not super great.
Now on your brothers side, they have $100.
Now your Mom comes along and wants to know how you both have been sprinting your money and figure out the finances for the family. If all she knows is you got $100 from part time jobs and that your brother has $100 in their wallet- your mom might assume you and your brother have $200. She needs that accounted for.
Most people likely won’t read or follow along with my longer version above and that is basically why the misconception exists, and why many of these misconceptions exist. People often lack either or both the attention spans and/or the fundamental knowledge base to digest anything that doesn’t happen at the instant they are interested and is more complex than can be explained to a lay person in 20 words or less. Peoples interest often stops at criticizing- after that they don’t actually care as much about the facts as it usually takes more energy and time to get the facts than to criticize based off a 10 second blurb that upset them.