The "black budget" is probably a monster of waste and graft. We're lucky we even get to see how much Palantir is getting.<p>Reminds me of this old article about TARP I was reading recently. They loaned out $700B to a select few companies, many who were former employers of cabinet and treasury members. And they weren't even required to tell the public what they did with it:<p>> They’d decided not to even ask banks to monitor what they did with the bailout money [..] Instead of lending their new cash to struggling homeowners and small businesses, as Summers had promised, the banks were literally sitting on it. [..] From the start, taxpayer money was used to subsidize a string of finance mergers, from the Chase-Bear Stearns deal to the Wells Fargo Wachovia merger to Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch.<p>> Congress had approved $700 billion to buy up toxic mortgages, but $250 billion of the money was now shifted to direct capital injections for banks.<p>Only $4 out of $700 billion ended up going to help home owners directly, the other $696B went to Wall St, even though it only passed congress because it was sold as helping the home owners:<p>> In fact, the amount of money that eventually got spent on homeowner aid now stands as a kind of grotesque joke compared to the Himalayan mountain range of cash that got moved onto the balance sheets of the big banks more or less instantly in the first months of the bailouts. At the start, $50 billion of TARP funds were earmarked for HAMP. In 2010, the size of the program was cut to $30 billion. As of November of last year, a mere $4 billion total has been spent for loan modifications and other homeowner aid.<p><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets-and-lies-of-the-bailout-113270/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets-...</a><p>It's always a great time to have friends in government, but even more so in recent years. Especially the way Trump has only increased spending, just like Obama and Bush did. Likewise public/private partnerships and investments directly into private firms have increased in numbers, particularly in defence.