Posted on 04/30/2025 8:25:42 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Imagine a vast ledger, chronicling the transactions of a mighty republic, now riddled with deliberate gaps and omissions, gaps no auditor may probe, no citizen may question. This is no fanciful dystopia, but the present reality, quietly authorized by what is known as Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56 (SFFAS 56). While initially crafted, perhaps, with honorable intentions to shield 'classified' operations from hostile eyes, SFFAS 56 now threatens the very transparency and public accountability that sustain a free government. Federal agencies are allowed to use SFFAS 56 to hide spending they desire to be 'classified' from the American people, Congress, and even the President of the United States.
What is SFFAS 56? At its core, it is an administrative rule issued by the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) in 2018, not a statute passed by Congress. It allows any federal agency to modify its financial statements in order to obscure sensitive national security information. This authority extends beyond the obvious domains of intelligence or defense, touching every department that produces General Purpose Federal Financial Reports, from USAID to the Department of Energy. In theory, this safeguard exists to prevent enemies from exploiting financial disclosures to learn state secrets. In practice, it creates a black hole into which billions of taxpayer dollars vanish without a trace.
To understand the peril, one must first grasp the astonishing breadth of the rule. Under SFFAS 56, agencies may alter financial reports by removing, aggregating, or fabricating information, provided these adjustments do not "materially" affect the reported net results. Further, agencies can exclude entire sub-entities from reports or consolidate them elsewhere, masking not merely amounts but organizational structures themselves. Crucially, neither the public nor Congress is afforded any right to know when these modifications occur, how often they happen, or the underlying reasons. A general, but nonspecific, disclaimer suffices, buried in the back pages of thick agency reports: "Accounting standards allow certain presentations and disclosures to be modified to prevent the disclosure of classified information."
Even Congress itself can be kept in the dark unless an agency, by its own volition, deigns to disclose the concealment. Thus, SFFAS 56 effectively removes the legislature’s constitutional power of the purse from critical oversight. It conjures a legal purgatory where funds can be appropriated for one purpose, redirected for another, and hidden altogether from elected representatives. The theoretical protections against abuse, internal controls, audits, classified oversight, are weak reeds indeed when the very financial data needed to detect mischief has been sanitized.
Proponents of SFFAS 56 argue that, without such protections, enemies could piece together vital intelligence from innocent-looking financial entries. Yet the ingenuity of our foes cannot justify the abandonment of self-government. If secrecy is to be justified, it must be rare, tightly controlled, and explicitly authorized by the people’s elected representatives. Instead, SFFAS 56 inverts the burden: concealment becomes the default, accountability the exception. One might as well argue that because a handful of bank robbers lurk at large, all citizens must henceforth veil their account balances from scrutiny.
History offers sobering lessons when governments assume powers of secret spending. The clandestine financing of "black ops" during the Cold War, sometimes used for noble ends, sometimes for ignoble, occurred under conditions of limited and direct congressional oversight. Even then, abuses proliferated. The Iran-Contra affair revealed how easily noble motives could give way to clandestine mischief when oversight was thwarted. Now, SFFAS 56 institutionalizes a structure far broader and more opaque than anything Colonel Oliver North could have dreamed.....SNIP
Thanks for the ping.
God Bless Elon Musk and his brave teams... may God watch over them, protect them, and give them the thanks of the people ...
Bad people seek out dark places to do their evil - it might have started as 'honorable' but that tag flew the coop decades ago...
Some agencies even hide their employee paychecks under other civilian department agencies.
Under SFFAS 56, agencies may alter financial reports by removing, aggregating, or fabricating information, provided these adjustments do not “materially” affect the reported net results.
Biden had a double meaning WHERE’S THE MONEY?
SFFAS 56 opens the doors to many things good and bad now what?.
Amen!
"You don't really believe they pay $500 for a hammer or toilet seat, do you?"
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