Yank the Pentagon's Chain, Hard

Plenty of budget cuts out there, folks!

Nearly $18 billion was awarded for reconstruction from 2007-2009, the audit showed, but the Pentagon, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) "are unable to readily report on how much money they spend on contracting for reconstruction activities in Afghanistan," the inspector general found.

...Four contracting organizations within the Department of Defense do not coordinate and share information with one another, the report found, adding there is a "minimal sharing" of information across government agencies.

If the geniuses at the Pentagon can't tell us where the money went, they don't need it.

Same stuff, different day:

The U.S. Department of Defense got more than $9 billion from the sale of Iraqi oil and other revenue streams to be used for reconstruction inside the war-damaged nation and spent it but now cannot document where $8.7 billion of those funds went, according to an inspector general's report.

How very nice! The US spends umpty-zillion "building democracy" and has no friggin' idea what, exactly, was "built."