Pushback of the Week, March 3, 2025
Over the many years that Catherine has tried to draw attention to the missing $21 trillion (and counting) and the financial coup d’état, few other prominent voices have even dared to broach the topic. That is why Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett’s recent comments about the Pentagon’s dark spending were so refreshing. Rep. Burchett stated:
“You have a Pentagon that has billions of dollars that they hide—we don’t ask for any accounting of [it]. They never passed an audit in the history of audits. I’ve often said, the only way we’re really going to get to the bottom of this is somebody’s going to walk out of one of these labs with this information and puts it out on the Internet before they ‘commit suicide’ by shooting themselves in the back of the head five times.”
In July 2023, Rep. Burchett “grilled” the DOD’s Deputy Inspector General for Audit, Brett Mansfield, about the issues DOD ostensibly faces in tracking the money that it spends. When Mansfield stammered out the usual range of weak excuses for the Pentagon’s failed audits, Rep. Burchett interrupted him to ask, “I appreciate all that, but don’t you think…if it has never come out right, that you all would fix that problem?” A year and a half later, Congressman Burchett voted against the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025, stating, “It spends $9 billion more than last year’s NDAA and the Pentagon just failed their seventh consecutive audit. I’m not going to vote taxpayer money into thin air or put it into the hands of folks who can’t handle it.”
In addition to two other House committees, Rep. Burchett serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. In late January, he joined the latter’s DOGE subcommittee (the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene). We hope that rather than cheerlead the DOGE team’s “Wild West” lawlessness, he will apply the same critical lens to DOGE as he has to the Pentagon.
