This past September a friend told me about a new ABC action series she’d started watching called “Designated Survivor” starring Jack Bauer. I mean, she didn’t say that it starred Jack Bauer, she said that it starred Kiefer Sutherland, but since I can never remember the character’s name from this new show it’s just easier for me to call him Jack Bauer.
In the first episode we find out that Jack has been serving as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and is an expert on a wide range of complex policy matters that most Americans can’t be bothered to understand because we’re way too busy blogging about television shows.
So anyway.
In the first episode some mysterious bad guys blow up our nation’s Capital, leaving our friend Jack the last man standing in the line of succession so he gets sworn in as the ding dang President of the United States! Pretty crazy, right?
The show had a decent premise and I half-heartedly kept up with it until the Christmas hiatus and by the time ABC finally put it back on the air I had completely lost interest UNTIL YESTERDAY MORNING when my friend Davy shared a link on Facebook declaring that Dr. Ben Carson (the new real-life Secretary of Housing and Urban Development) had just completed an audit of his cabinet department, and had uncovered a shocking $500 billion in errors!
That’s enough money to buy 35 new aircraft carriers or, on an annual basis, estimated to be more than enough to end world hunger.
If you’re anything like me you’d really like to know how Secretary Carson uncovered this deep dark financial secret so quickly after his appointment, but I was pretty sure that I shouldn’t click on the link that Davy had posted because I didn’t recognize the source.
Facebook has started warning us that we live in an age of ‘fake news’ and the number one way to spot fake news is to consider the source, and I sure as heck did not recognize the website called SacredConservativeTruthAgenda.org, nor did I recognize the one named RightWingJewsNews.net.
To be fair, a lot of my friends of all political stripes cite sources as dubious as Davy’s.
A quick scroll through my newsfeed reveals citations for “news sources” like EagleBloodJusticeShrike.net, LiberalPinkHoneyNews.org, RightWingJazzHands.biz, and FlagWavingTittyMommas.omg. In full disclosure I probably clicked on that last one a few dozen times just to make sure that it was fake news, but you get my point: a lot of these “sources” sound like they’re run by lone individuals sitting on a couch in their boxer shorts… yeah, I am.
So if not me, who can you trust these days?
Until these crazy ass fake websites start winning Pulitzers I’m going to stick with recognized newspapers like The Failing New York Times and The Floundering Washington Post.
For this story I checked with the presidentially sanctioned news source Fox News, and they haven’t posted anything about this story.
Even that short guy with the weird speech impediment over on Fox Business News hasn’t even been talking about this shocking story on his 9am morning show, and he knows everything. Just ask him! (Pompousness is the lowest form of wit, Stuart)
So listen, maybe we should just take a chance and trust ourselves.
With no reliable sources reporting on this missing $500 Billion I was faced with doing my own investigation, and you know what? You can too, because the audit has been posted to the public via the website of the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
This is a direct link to that PDF on the HUD website.
In case it goes away for some reason, here’s a direct link to the same file from this website (Click Here).
The first thing you’ll learn by reading page one is that HUD Secretary Ben Carson had nothing to do with this audit because it’s an annually required action that would have transpired regardless of who held the office as the rules state “In accordance with the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990” – not to mention that the audit was completed months before he assumed office.
Furthermore, if you continue reading the audit (as I have tried to do while sitting on the couch watching Star Trek: Enterprise on Netflix) you’ll see that five hundred billion dollars were never actually “missing” so much as poorly accounted for, according to the audit.
I don’t know if you’re as lazy as I am about balancing your home checkbook, but I am occasionally forced into running an audit of my account and inevitably end up scratching my head for half an hour because the ledger is out of whack by some peculiar amount. After a lot of muttering I finally discover that I’ve made a simple error, like counting a check twice. There was never any money missing, it just wasn’t accounted for properly (until it was all balanced out).
Now multiply my tiny accounting errors by several orders of magnitude and that’s what I understand is going on with HUD’s report. Their budget isn’t big enough to squirrel away $500 Billion, it’s just that they (apparently) suck at balancing their own books. If you’ll go and read the audit report for yourself (which I’d encourage, instead of believing my lazy perusal) you’ll likely see that the summary explains that money wasn’t missing, it was just counted wrong, or not counted at all, or modeled improperly, or whatever it is that they do to keep up with it.
HUD’s accounting ledgers are probably a far worse nightmare that you or I could possibly imagine.
As you read you’ll see that the audit report states that there were “material weaknesses” in the accounting of monies in which costs were estimated incorrectly. The audit found that there were non-compliance issues resulting in missed opportunities to collect tens of millions of dollars in debt. There are problems and unquestionably have been for years, because government can be terrible at scaling and often finds scope creep irresistible.
The lies that these fake news sources spread are galling, because my friends often believe the headlines they read because they often don’t take the time to actually follow stories back to their sources. They’re busy and probably as lazy as I am. It’s easier to just believe what somebody else tells us, especially if it fits the comfortable narratives that we already believe.
But we don’t have to let this happen.
While the partisan websites are out there spreading misinformation, as in this case, about Ben Carson spearheading a shocking audit, there’s no question (at least in my mind) that HUD could naturally stand to see some pretty substantial streamlining if the audit revealed such troubling accounting procedures.
But I’m no Jack Bauer, and Secretary-Doctor Ben Carson was never the Designated Auditor – that job belongs to the Honorable David A. Montoya, the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
And for the record: neither of them is T’pol, the hot Vulcan officer from Star Trek: Enterprise who has to have lotion rubbed all over her body all the time, mostly because I keep playing that part of the episode over and over again as I try to make you go go away to do your own research.
You guys are seriously cutting into my Star Trek watching time.
Read a book.
Stop sharing junk stories that you didn’t research.
Scram.
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Edit: it’s been several days since I posted this article and I just had to come back and write that I feel embarrassed at having shared the photo of actress Jolene Blalock with her top off and kind of embarrassed that the producers felt it necessary to have her get naked from time to time during the show. It’s still sexy as heck, but the show could have stood on its own without it. The only thing that kept this series from wider acceptance was that it wasn’t run on a major network.