In a massive smackdown of a questioning moment during a House Oversight Committee hearing, MAGA-aligned Congressman Brandon Gill (R-TX) went nuclear exposing a huge fraud scandal within the Pentagon, revealing to the country that hundreds of billions of dollars have gone missing and need to be recovered.
For reference, the hearing in which that explosive matter was revealed was titled “Safeguarding Procurement: Examining Fraud Risk Management in the Department of Defense” and occurred on June 4, with both Rep. Gill and Subcommittee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX) noting that the fraud issue is quite severe.
That came when they questioned Seto Bagdoyen, the Director of Forensic Audits and Investigative Services at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, about the level of fraud within the Department of Defense, with a particular eye as to how great the dollar amount of waste within that department is and why it can’t pass an audit.
Beginning, Rep. Gill said, addressing the witness, “A recent report by the GAO found that for fiscal years 2017 through 2024 DoD reported about $10.8 billion in confirmed fraud. The report went on to say, ‘the full extent of fraud affecting DoD is not known, but is potentially significant.’ Do you have a monetary estimate of the fraud that takes place annually within the DOD, perhaps beyond that number?”
Mr. Bagdoyen, trying to address the matter, said, “I do not, and actually the figure you quoted is for all fraud around DOD, not just procurement. The recovered amount, is about $7 billion over a number of years, is for procurement. So those are two different sets of numbers. Plus,for the confirmed fraud. We did notice, and I believe the IG may have flagged this as well, that DOD reported the same figure, $2.4 billion, for two consecutive fiscal years.”
Continuing, he noted that there is still a great amount that could have been missed because of what the adjudicated number means, saying, “So that raises some questions about the reliability of what’s been reported. I believe in the past, the OIG has questioned the process of arriving at those types of numbers, so I would urge some caution in using those numbers. But they do represent what is basically known through adjudication, so they have to be detected first, investigated, then adjudicated, and so we have no idea what is being missed.”
Building on that, Rep. Gill asked him what the total amount might be, asking, “If you were to guess, would you guess that total fraud at the DoD is higher than that number?” Mr. Bagdoyen explained, “I would suspect it is yes.” Gill, in response, followed up with another question on how the Pentagon is responding to this matter, asking, “And how many open recommendations issued by the GAO are there that would improve financial management within the DOD?”
"*" indicates required fields
Responding, Bagdoyen told him that the Pentagon is being somewhat slow about implementing over a dozen recommendations that would address the fraud issue, saying, “For financial management, I will have to get back to you on fraud risk management based on the three reports that I’ve been responsible over the last six years or so. We still have 13 open recommendations. We are expecting responses from DOD, as I mentioned before, throughout June and into next month, we just sent over the list of priority recommendations to the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Hegseth, for his personal attention. And so that letter will be made public early next week.”
Gill replied with a question that drilled down on the basic issue, which is that the fraud is substanial, saying, “But either way, it’s a substantial number?” Bagdoyen told him, “It is a substantial number. The risks are immediate, so delaying implementation exacerbates that risk.”
Rep. Gill then asked the audit director, as a follow-up that drilled down on the other important aspect of this, which is that the Pentagon is being slow about fixing things, aksing, “Why do you think they have delayed implementation, and how long should it take for for the DOD to implement some of the recommendations that have been given to them?”
Explaining what might be going on, Bagdoyen noted that there appears to be a lack of urgency in fixing the fraud, a real scandal. He said, “Yeah, to be fair, it does take time to do this and to do it right, but we have encountered pretty significant delays, I think, over time that may reflect lack of attention, lack of urgency, lack of priority. That is speculative on my part, but it is consistent with what we’ve encountered with other agencies.”
Watch them here:
Featured image credit: base image from the embedded video