(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Apparently our government cannot explain how 4.7 trillion dollars was spent. Are you kidding me? A stack of 4.7 trillion one dollar bills would reach all the way to the Moon and part of the way back. This is yet another example of why we desperately need the Department of Government Efficiency. I realize that my articles about DOGE have caused some confusion in recent weeks, and so let me try to explain. On the one hand, I have been arguing that we must crack down on waste, fraud and abuse, but on the other hand I have been arguing that what DOGE is doing is going to cause a great deal of pain.
Some readers think that I have been contradicting myself, but I have not been contradicting myself at all. There are times when we must do things that are necessary even though we know that they will cause a tremendous amount of pain. We have piled up the largest mountain of debt in the history of the entire planet, and it really is an existential threat to the future of our nation. But cutting down the size of the federal government and greatly reducing the flow of cash that is being spewed out of the giant money machine that we call the U.S. Treasury is going to cause immense chaos. Honestly, I do not know if our society will be able to handle it.
On Monday, DOGE revealed that 4.7 trillion dollars in payments that have come through the U.S. Treasury are basically impossible to trace because they lacked a very important tracking code…
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that some $4.7 trillion in payments from the Treasury Department were missing a critical tracking code which made tracing the transactions “almost impossible.”
The transactions were reportedly missing the Treasury Account Symbol, or TAS, an identification code which links a Treasury payment to a budget line item, according to DOGE, which described the use of such code as a “standard financial process.”
“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” read an X post from DOGE.
This is inexcusable. We should be able to trace how every single penny has been spent.
As Eric Daugherty has aptly pointed out, if you do not accurately account for every single penny of income the IRS can come after you big time…
The government will audit you, track every single dollar that went into your bank account, and hunt you down to squeeze every last penny.
But once they get hold of YOUR money – they chuck it into a black hole of their choice with little to no accountability.
Two standards.
If you tried to tell the IRS that you have no idea what happened to $4,700, you would not get one inch of mercy.
But now we are being told that the government has no idea what happened to $4,700,000,000,000.
The good news is that from now on all government payments that flow through the U.S. Treasury will be traceable thanks to DOGE…
“As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going,” DOGE said, thanking the Treasury Department for its “great work” implementing the change.
Musk touted the change as a “major improvement in Treasury payment integrity.”
“This was a combined effort of [DOGE, Treasury and the Federal Reserve],” Musk tweeted. “Nice work by all.”
This is a very positive change.
And when good things happen in Washington D.C., we should all applaud.
Overall, reforms implemented by DOGE have saved U.S. taxpayers a grand total of 55 billion dollars…
Elon Musk’s DOGE revealed Tuesday that President Donald Trump has saved taxpayers a staggering $55 billion in less than a month.
It said the savings were found through a combination of detecting and deleting fraud, canceling contracts and leases, and selling assets.
The group – nicknamed the ‘nerd army’ – also ended grants, fired federal employees, changed some programs, and saved money with regulatory reforms.
So far, the biggest contract savings have come from USAID and the Department of Education…
So far, the DOGE lists the United States Agency for International Development as the number one agency for “total contract savings,” followed by the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Agriculture.
Sadly, the left is not applauding these efforts.
In fact, many on the left are acting like it is the end of the world.
Could it be possible that the reason why they are so upset is because they are the ones that are primarily benefitting from all of the waste, fraud and abuse?
Billions of dollars in payments have already been cut off, and DOGE insists that this is just the beginning.
And now it appears that Ft. Knox will be one of the next targets for DOGE…
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has his sights set on an audit of the U.S. gold reserve at Ft. Knox through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after it was revealed there is no yearly review for the world-renowned stash.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who invited Musk to review the gold reserve on X over the weekend, joined “FOX & Friends” to discuss the need for greater transparency about the massive reserve after trying to verify it himself for a decade.
If the DOGE team actually visits Ft. Knox, what will they find?
I don’t know, but I find it very interesting that “somebody” in the U.S. has been purchasing a massive amount of physical gold. This is something that Glenn Beck recently commented on…
“Somebody here in the United States is buying a crapload of gold. We think (I hope) it’s the Treasury or the Central Bank,” he says.
Whoever is behind the purchases — “somebody with very deep pockets” — isn’t just collecting gold notes, either.
Whoever this mysterious somebody is, they’re “taking huge physical deliveries, and it’s causing shortages in London,” says Glenn.
I am just speculating here, but could it be possible that this physical gold is being used to replenish the reserves at Ft. Knox before an audit happens?
Hopefully we will soon get some answers.
Personally, I would love for the mystery of the missing gold at Ft. Knox to be solved after all these years.
Under previous administrations, the transparency that is happening now would never have been possible.
But now some of the U.S. government’s deepest and darkest secrets are being laid bare, and that is a wonderful thing.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.