The ongoing spending cuts mandated by the federal budget sequester will take a toll on the U.S. military, according to defense experts. Officials from the Pentagon and some members of Congress warn that Americans’ safety will be at risk if scheduled spending cuts proceed.

Yet, at about the same time as these warnings are being heard, an Associated Press report finds that Pentagon spending is a mess. The massive size of the Pentagon budget would be a challenge for any organization to manage, but as with most government entities, there is no urgency, given that it is “other people’s money” being spent.

A recent AP story reported that despite the efforts of several presidents, secretaries of defense and key members of Congress, nobody has a good handle on where “boatloads of money that go to the Defense Department” end up.

The AP report recalls an effort by President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s to get a handle on Pentagon spending. Top auditors in Clinton’s administration tried to track the dollars, focusing on $7 trillion in military spending over nearly a decade. The auditors could not find documentation for $2.3 trillion — and they gave up the effort.

Other AP stories report that Defense Department officials pressured their own accountants to not release critical findings about the Pentagon books. The Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General, which operates over the internal accountants, also is accused of silencing reports critical of Pentagon accounting.

This is a lot more than the stories of $700 toilet seats and $400 hammers that made news years ago. This is about a federal department with a half trillion-dollar budget, the largest of all federal agencies, not being able to explain where billions of taxpayer dollars are going.

So, while the U.S. military does have awesome responsibilities, especially in today’s volatile and rapidly changing world, it is still shocking that the Pentagon cannot say where hundreds of billions of tax dollars go every year. The surge in military spending triggered by the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have only made the problem worse.

The stories of wasted money in Afghanistan and Iraq included pallets of bundled bills being showered on tribal warlords, with presumably no accounting records. There were also stories of expensive, even luxurious, new facilities being built in Afghanistan despite U.S. military officials on the ground saying they did not need and would not use the buildings — they were completed and then abandoned.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and others are warning that further spending restraint at the Pentagon will harm U.S. readiness and weaken America’s military capabilities.

But taxpayers have to wonder how much of these threats are real and how much is coming from defense contractors who don’t want to see the money spigot tightened, even a little bit.

If the Pentagon cannot account for billions of dollars being spent, why should Congress agree to send more taxpayer money into a partial black hole?

The Pentagon is years behind a 1990 congressional mandate to have its financial records audited by an outside accounting firm. The last deadline for having the Pentagon’s books audited was missed. Now, the next deadline is 2017. And according to the AP, few people familiar with the Pentagon budget expect that deadline to be met.

Congress should not tolerate such massive spending with little or no accountability. Any debate over sequester cuts should include questions about billions spent without proper accounting.