{"id":42953,"date":"2019-01-19T08:10:01","date_gmt":"2019-01-19T13:10:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42953"},"modified":"2019-01-19T08:10:01","modified_gmt":"2019-01-19T13:10:01","slug":"has-the-government-legalized-secret-defense-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42953","title":{"rendered":"Has the Government Legalized Secret Defense Spending?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Has the Government Legalized Secret Defense Spending?<\/a><\/h3>\n

While a noisy Supreme Court fight captivated America last fall, an obscure federal accounting body quietly approved a system of classified money-moving<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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Aerial view of the Pentagon building. \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Bill Clark\/CQ Roll Call\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

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October 4th<\/sup>, 2018, was a busy news day. The fight over Brett Kavanuagh\u2019s Supreme Court nomination dominated the cycle. The Trump White House received a supplemental FBI report<\/a> it said cleared its would-be nominee of wrongdoing. Retired Justice John Paul Stevens meanwhile said Kavanaugh was compromised enough that he was \u201cunable to sit as a judge<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

#NationalTacoDay<\/a> trended on Twitter. Chris Evans told the world<\/a> production wrapped on Avengers 4. <\/em><\/p>\n

The only thing that did not make the news was an announcement<\/a> by a little-known government body called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board \u2014 FASAB \u2014 that essentially legalized secret national security spending. The new guidance, \u201cSFFAS 56 \u2013 CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES\u201d permits government agencies to \u201cmodify\u201d public financial statements and move expenditures from one line item to another. It also expressly allows federal agencies to refrain from telling taxpayers if and when public financial statements have been altered.<\/p>\n

To Michigan State professor Mark Skidmore, who\u2019s been studying<\/a> discrepancies in defense expenditures<\/a> for years, the new ruling \u2014 and the lack of public response to it \u2014 was a shock.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom this point forward,\u201d he says, \u201cthe federal government will keep two sets of books, one modified book for the public and one true book that is hidden.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists\u2019<\/a> Project on Government Secrecy<\/a>was one of the few people across the country to pay attention to the FASAB news release. He was alarmed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt diminishes the credibility of all public budget documents,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

I spent weeks trying to find a more harmless explanation for SFFAS 56, or at least one that did not amount to a rule that allows federal officials to fake public financial reports.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Has the Government Legalized Secret Defense Spending? While a noisy Supreme Court fight captivated America last fall, an obscure federal accounting body quietly approved a system of classified money-moving Aerial view of the Pentagon building. \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Bill Clark\/CQ Roll Call\/Getty Images October 4th, 2018, was a busy news day. The fight over Brett Kavanuagh\u2019s Supreme […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[3758,24032,24035,24036,24033,3733,19144,24034,843],"class_list":["post-42953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-accounting","tag-defense-spending","tag-fasab","tag-federal-accounting-standards-advisory-board","tag-mark-skidmore","tag-matt-taibbi","tag-rolling-stone","tag-steven-aftergood","tag-us-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42953"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42954,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42953\/revisions\/42954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}