In the years surrounding the September 11 attacks, questions began to emerge about massive discrepancies inside U.S. government financial records—particularly within the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts later became one of the most prominent figures investigating what she and economist Mark Skidmore call the “missing money.”
Their research began after Fitts highlighted unusual accounting figures in Pentagon financial reports. When Skidmore reviewed the underlying government documents, he discovered trillions of dollars in what auditors call “unsupported accounting adjustments.” These are financial entries recorded without adequate documentation explaining where the money originated or where it ultimately went.
By examining reports from the Office of Inspector General between 1998 and 2015, researchers compiled evidence of approximately $21 trillion in undocumented adjustments across the Department of Defense and HUD. In some cases, individual yearly adjustments were vastly larger than the agencies’ authorized budgets—for example, a Pentagon report showed $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments in 2015, despite the Army’s budget being about $122 billion.
The issue of untraceable funds was not entirely new. On September 10, 2001, one day before the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld publicly acknowledged that the Pentagon could not properly track $2.3 trillion in transactions due to outdated accounting systems and bureaucratic inefficiencies.
Fitts and Skidmore argue that these enormous accounting discrepancies represent a systemic failure of financial transparency within federal agencies. They have called for congressional investigations and deeper audits to determine how such large adjustments were recorded without supporting documentation. Their work suggests that the scale and persistence of these discrepancies raise fundamental questions about federal financial management and oversight.
However, many analysts emphasize an important distinction: the reported trillions do not necessarily represent a single pool of missing cash. Instead, they reflect accounting entries that cannot be properly traced through existing financial systems. The same dollar may be counted multiple times across different ledgers or systems, creating enormous totals when aggregated.
The debate surrounding the “missing trillions” continues today. For critics, it illustrates the urgent need for transparent government accounting and modernized financial systems. For others, it highlights the complexity of managing the finances of one of the world’s largest institutions. Either way, the research sparked by Catherine Austin Fitts has forced a broader conversation about accountability, national budgets, and the integrity of public financial records.
