Donald Rumsfeld didn’t report $2.3 trillion missing from the Pentagon the day before 9/11

Context 

According to a video on TikTok, on the day before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that 2.3 trillion dollars had gone missing from the Pentagon. Without saying it directly, the video implies that the attacks were used as a cover-up to distract from where all those trillions of dollars had gone, labeling it a “coincidence” that the attacks happened just the day after the announcement. On Facebook, a clip from the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is circulating in which Rogan poses a similar claim.

However, while Rumsfeld did mention the figure of 2.3 trillion dollars in a speech the day before the attacks, he was not talking about money that had gone missing, but money on the Defence Department’s spending ledgers that was found to be insufficiently supported. He was using it as an example of why the Department’s outdated financial systems had to be modernized. At that time, the figure had been publicly known for more than a year. 

In fact

In March 2000, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Pentagon’s financial managers had made almost $7 trillion in adjustments to their financial ledgers to make them add up. “The Pentagon could not show receipts for $2.3 trillion of those changes, and half a trillion dollars of it was just corrections of mistakes made in earlier adjustments,” the paper reported.

Talking about the need to modernize the Defence Department’s financial systems, Rumsfeld did mention the figure in a speech he gave at the Department of Defense’s Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week on September 10, 2001. 

“The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible,” said Rumsfeld, according to a transcript of the speech.

Rumsfeld was not the first one to make this point. More than a year earlier, an assistant inspector general for the Department of Defense had testified before members of Congress, saying it had been difficult for the Department of Defense to “emulate private sector financial reporting practices” and speaking to “how poor the existing systems are.”

“The magnitude of the problem is further demonstrated by the fact that, of $5.8 trillion of those adjustments that we audited this year, $2.3 trillion were unsupported by reliable explanatory information and audit trails or were made to invalid general ledger accounts,” said the assistant inspector general according in the testimony.

The verdict

Donald Rumsfeld did mention 2.3 trillion dollars in a speech the day before the 9/11 terrorist attack. However, he referred not to money that had gone missing, but to adjustments made to the Defence Department’s spending ledgers that couldn’t be properly accounted for. The figure had been publicly known for more than a year. Therefore, we have marked this claim as misleading.