While it's still a lot of money I felt the same way. As a percentage of their overall budget, that's not a lot of moeny for an institution to lose track of, considering the entire DoD is not audit-ready and hasn't done an audit in many many years.
I had the same memory as you, but after looking it up an hour ago, I'm willing to write that one off as a bit conspiracy-theorist. It seemed like it was in the context of upgrading their systems to track this sort of stuff.
Of course, as I type that out it sounds like a load of baloney.
Yeah, in fairness he was saying "our accounting system is so antiquated that we've had to do $2.3 trillion worth of acquisitions in an alternate way that isn't tracked in it."
