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Treasury Secretary Bessent and Elon Musk Announce Preliminary Spending Standards for UST
The Last Refuge ^ | February 8, 2025 | Sundance

Posted on 02/09/2025 9:31:07 AM PST by SoConPubbie

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To: Sequoyah101

Somebody post or send this to Musk. I don’t have an X account

I wish that Musk or Trump would understand that understanding and ending provisions of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and all amendments to it are key to controlling rampant spending and the whole shut down cycle and CR’s. Without killing that beast there can be no lasting reform or actual budget.

Some of us have been screaming this for years without notice.

Why? Why doesn’t anybody understand this is one of our very biggest problems?


21 posted on 02/09/2025 10:21:28 AM PST by Sequoyah101 (Donald John Trump. First man to be Elected to the Presidency THREE times since FDR.)
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To: anonsquared

Why isn’t this obvious?


22 posted on 02/09/2025 10:22:59 AM PST by Sequoyah101 (Donald John Trump. First man to be Elected to the Presidency THREE times since FDR.)
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To: Sequoyah101

Continuing Resolutions needed to be stopped. An easy way to do that would be to not allow any budget increase with a CR but also require a 10% across the board reduction in the budget every time one is passed. That would incentivize Congress to actually do their job and pass a budget.

Two other priorities:

Roll back the Smith-Mundt Act repeal of 2012-2013 done by Obama which made it legal for the US Government to propagandize American citizens. The leftist fact checkers will always say that didn’t happen as it only pertained to NPR and not private media organizations. The US Aid revelations prove that all media world wide is getting a US government paycheck showing that argument is just more lies and gaslighting.

In addition, repeal the Patriot Act. Just another means to allow a corrupt government to persecute citizens. Trump should have never allowed it to renew during his first term.

If those things are not accomplished, Trump and his team are not serious about protecting the American people against a corrupt government and worldwide bad actors intent on taking our freedoms.


23 posted on 02/09/2025 10:37:19 AM PST by anonsquared
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To: SoConPubbie
Estimates for Defense and HUD look to be a little on the low side 🫣

There’s been a lot of missing money in these two agencies for decades.

https://missingmoney.solari.com/the-solari-papers-1/

24 posted on 02/09/2025 10:39:49 AM PST by yelostar
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To: TornadoAlley3

Good news. Thank you.


25 posted on 02/09/2025 10:50:06 AM PST by laplata (They want each crisis to take the greatest toll possible.)
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To: SoConPubbie

In my humble opinion each payment should be coded with the CFR number that gave the authorization and appropriation. Also you can use MS project or some such software tool and tie all federal work to a CFR this would align the activity to the legislation. or if the CFR is just a regulation without appropriate legislation then i could be eliminated .


26 posted on 02/09/2025 11:11:26 AM PST by kvanbrunt2
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To: SoConPubbie

how in the world haven’t past Tsy Sec’ys not instituted these basic accounting rules? as stunning as hearing the SS system has no set-up to identiy duplicate use of SS#s. good God.


27 posted on 02/09/2025 11:39:51 AM PST by avital2
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To: yelostar
Link to info specifically on DoD and HUD :

https://missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-supporting-documentation/

On the page is a link to a 5-pg PDF:

Summary Report on “Unsupported Journal Voucher Adjustments” in the Financial Statements of the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development*

*Since we first published this report, it appears that some of the links to original sources at the Office of the Inspector General have been changed or taken off line. However, all of the original government documents can be found at Solari.

These two reports (the Rumsfeld announcement in 2001 regarding the “lost” $2.3 trillion and the $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments in 2015) prompted us to conduct a search at the website of the Office of the Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office to compile documents between the years 1998 and 2015 for the DOD and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that indicate the amounts of unsupported journal voucher adjustments. To make these documents more easily accessible to the general public, they have been made available at https:// missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-supporting-documentation/. While we were unable to recover data for a number of years, we were successful in identifying $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments for DOD and $350 billion for HUD. For those unaccustomed to dealing with large figures, $21 trillion is equal to about $166,000 per household in the United States. For further context, the entire sum of authorized DOD and HUD spending for years 1998-2015 in nominal terms was $8.6 trillion and $781 billion, respectively. Thus, the unsupported journal voucher adjustments we identified for DOD, which are incomplete, were more than twice the size of authorized spending over the period. The sums are smaller for HUD in relation to its total budget, in part because we were only able to identify four years for which the amounts of unsupported adjustments or errors were reported. However, in fiscal year 2015, HUD “material errors” in reporting were $270 billion, nearly eight times the size of its $36 billion budget.

Solari was doing this work in the latter part of 2017. At the link they show an initial date/first update of October 5, 2017.

Almost to the day, one year later (October 4, 2018), was the announcement of FASAB 56, which in essence allowed the government to keep secret “off book” books. For reasons of………………………………………national security.

http://files.fasab.gov/pdffiles/sffas_56_nr.pdf

The Solari Report on FASAB 56:

https://home.solari.com/fasab-statement-56-understanding-new-government-financial-accounting-loopholes/

In the absolute most simple terms, Standard 56 allows federal entities to shift amounts from line item to line item and sometimes even omit spending altogether when reporting their financials in order to avoid the potential of revealing classified information. However, as with all laws, nearly every word in that sentence is a complicated concept to unpack. Who counts as a federal reporting entity? When and how can these entities conceal or remove financial information from their reports? What information can be removed? When does something count as confidential, and who makes that determination? All of these questions have enormous bodies of writing in FASAB memorandums addressing, and sometimes failing to address, their answers.

The simplest place to start with understanding Standard 56 is its scope. It applies to federal entities that issue unclassified general purpose federal financial reports (GPFFR), including where one entity is consolidated with another. This means it only applies to otherwise unclassified financial reports where there is a risk of revealing classified information; classified financial reports are their own can of worms. (see generally FASAB Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56, available at http://files.fasab.gov/pdffiles/handbook_sffas_56.pdf) Standard 56 also doesn’t remove the actual requirement to report, it just allows these entities to change their reports in ways that don’t reflect their actual spending. (see id.) However, for the purposes of government transparency, determining who is responsible for classifying information, and/or removing that information from unclassified reports, is quite opaque for the average interested citizen.


Another subject that the Solari Report has researched is the Exchange Stabilization Fund.

Catherine Austin Fitts

The Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) is a fund managed by the New York Federal Reserve and its member banks acting as agents for the US Secretary of the Treasury. The fund is free of Congressional oversight, with broad authority to intervene in currency, securities, and commodities markets.

The fund was created by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. The act required that all gold and gold certificates held by the Federal Reserve be surrendered and vested in the sole title of the US Treasury. A 1970 amendment to the act allows the Secretary of the Treasury, with authorization of the President, to use ESF funds to “deal in gold, foreign exchange, and other instruments of credit and securities.”

Long-time Solari Report subscribers are used to hearing me describe the ESF as the “mother of all slush funds.”

https://home.solari.com/the-exchange-stabilization-fund-with-rob-kirby/

28 posted on 02/09/2025 11:56:07 AM PST by yelostar
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To: avital2

oops sorry for double negative


29 posted on 02/09/2025 12:11:27 PM PST by avital2
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; BraveMan; cardinal4; ...

30 posted on 02/09/2025 6:26:57 PM PST by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
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To: yelostar

Estimates for Defense and HUD look to be a little on the low side 🫣
There’s been a lot of missing money in these two agencies for decades.

***********************

If both get the “kid glove” treatment, very little will change in the huge disparity in federal receipts to outlays.


31 posted on 02/09/2025 8:29:35 PM PST by unclebankster (Globalism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. )
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