Has the Pentagon failed its 7th audit in a row?

In November 2024, the Pentagon failed to pass its annual audit, meaning that it wasn’t able to fully account for how its $824 billion budget was used. This was the 7th failed audit in a row, since the Department of Defense became required to undergo yearly-audits in 2018.

In 2024, nine of the twenty eight Department of Defense sub-audits passed, an increase over the seven passing sub-audits in 2022 and 2023. None failed outright, but in fifteen there wasn’t enough information to come to a conclusion and in one, isolated, but not pervasive, errors were found. The decentralization and size of the Department of Defense, with $4 trillion in assets dispersed across 50 states and over 4,500 locations worldwide, is blamed for this accounting failure.

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 requires the Department of Defense to fully pass its audit by 2028.