PolitiFact – Pentagon did not report trillions of dollars missing the day before 9/11

A conspiracy theory linking the Department of Defense to the 9/11 attacks has resurfaced on social media.

“The day before 9/11 the Pentagon reported $2.3 trillion missing. Joe Rogan explains,” said the first slide in a two-slide Instagram post shared June 25 by several social media posts. 

The second slide includes a 2019 clip from Rogan’s podcast, where he says, “The day before 9/11, the day before the attacks, (former Department of Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld gave a press conference where he talked about trillions of dollars missing. The day. Then, a plane slams into the very part of the building where they were doing the accounting. Blows up half the f—-ing building in the Pentagon, blows up a wall.”

It later cuts to audio of Rumsfeld saying, “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”

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The Pentagon did not report $2.3 trillion missing on Sept. 10, 2001. Accounting entries totaling that amount that lacked adequate audit trails were detailed in government records, news reports and an official’s testimonies long before 9/11.

A Feb. 25, 2000, report by the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General identified $2.3 trillion in accounting entries for fiscal year 1999 that “were not supported by adequate audit trails or sufficient evidence to determine their validity.”

The report said many of these entries resulted from inadequate reviews and reconciliations.

Rumsfeld mentioned this during a speech at the Pentagon on Sept. 10, 2001, when he spoke about bureaucracy in the Department of Defense and announced measures to cut red tape.

Rumsfeld said, “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.”

Rumsfeld’s comments were not the first mention of the money. The Los Angeles Times published a March 5, 2000, story about it.

In May 9, 2000, in testimony to a House subcommittee, then-Department of Defense Assistant Inspector General for Auditing Robert J. Lieberman also mentioned that $2.3 trillion was unsupported by reliable explanatory information and audit trails. He repeated this in another testimony on July 20, 2000.

Another audit report dated Aug. 18, 2000, said, “As a result of processing $7.6 trillion of department-level accounting entries, of which $2.3 trillion could not be supported or were made to invalid general ledger accounts, the DoD Agency-Wide financial statements for FY 1999 were subject to a high risk of material misstatement.”

The Associated Press, Lead Stories and USA Today also fact-checked similar claims. 

We rate the claim that “the day before 9/11 the Pentagon reported $2.3 trillion missing” False.