Nick Turse Quotes

Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) has called for an audit of the Pentagon, so that we finally have some transparency and accountability in how DOD spends taxpayer dollars.

Our Defense Department is the best in the world at winning wars and protecting the country. However on basic management, and fiscal activities, their grade would be a D…. The Pentagon is the last obstacle we have to overcome in order to audit the Defense Department. They are unauditable today.

We need transparency in government spending. We need to put each government expenditure online so every Floridian can see where their tax money is being spent.

Pentagon dollars are essentially seen as a different kind of funding that doesn't have to stand for itself and make an argument for itself in the house of Congress.

I am not about to let the people who so mismanaged the state budget now try to manage local government.

The president's budget request today demonstrates his unwillingness to come clean on the true costs of his agenda. A penny saved is not a penny earned if at the end of the day you still owe a quarter.

Hiding spending does not reduce spending.

Government ... simply has no bottom line.

What chiefly governs the military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.

For too long it was assumed that you could completely separate out flows of money from responsibilities and accountabilities in service delivery. This flawed assumption is central to understanding many of the failures.

The Pentagon says that they are too big to be audited. That’s an insult. They spend $700 billion a year. They need to be audited.

The Pentagon is the Poster Child for waste in Government.

There is no doubt that there is a very strange phenomenon called the 'State Comptroller.'

Taxpayers should be able to see where their money is being spent and what impact it is having.

We want to make sure the military gets it right and understands that if they're going to have less money, they're going to have to spend it a lot more smartly.

The Executive is charged officially in the Departments under it with the disbursement of the public money, and is responsible for the faithful application of it to the purposes for which it is raised. The Legislature is the watchful guardian over the public purse. It is its duty to see that the disbursement has been honestly made.

The only way to meet pressing social needs and be fiscally responsible is to cut the runaway Pentagon budget, which now almost equals the military spending of all other countries in the world combined.

Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society.

We have no idea how much the government knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. The government is not supposed to be doing this in this country. They listen in on our phone calls. I am not exaggerating because I have studied this a long time.

Early in my term I will also be requesting that all NATO nations promptly pay their bills, which many are not now doing.

I don't know how much money I've got. I did ask the accountant how much it came to. I wrote it down on a bit of paper. But I've lost the bit of paper.

The current budget that the Republicans are looking at never balances. How can that be fiscally responsible? And how can we look at the public with a straight face and say yes we ran on balanced budgets.

I certainly do believe anyone engaged in the management of money should have a standard of measurement, and that both he and the party whose money is managed should have a clear understanding why it is the appropriate standard, what time period should be utilized, etc.

A person who is careless about money is careless about everything, and untrustworthy in everything.

The military budget is simply an enormous pork barrel of special privilege, the privileges taking the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and, most importantly, of enormous outlays of capital supplied by the Pentagon to arms contractors.