New Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has committed the Pentagon to a clean audit within four years.
On Friday, at a town-hall event, Hegseth said there needed to be transparency about defense spending.
The Pentagon failed its seventh straight audit in November. Around half of all agencies failed their audits. The Pentagon became legally obliged to pass its audits in 2018.
Only the Marines have passed a clean audit. This week the branch was given approval for its $49 billion in financial assets.
“The American taxpayers deserve that,” Hegseth said. “They deserve to know where their $850 billion dollars go, how it’s spent, and make sure it’s spent wisely.”
“Nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer money is being spent by the Pentagon every year,” he continued.
The Pentagon is “accountable for every dollar we spend, and every dollar will waste we find or redundancy is one dollar we can invest somewhere else.”
Hegseth told the town hall that the Pentagon’s new focus would be on deterrence and protecting the southern border. He called for accountability for top officials who oversaw the withdrawal from Afghanistan under Joe Biden, and also promised tat diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI) initiatives in the military would end.