Not exactly. The whole “money went missing” and “stolen” take on it is, a little bit of a misrepresentation.
The whole thing Cheney was on about was accounting practices and the lack of a system to share and track information between departments. The claim was $2.3 trillion in transactions couldn’t be tracked adequately. Not that that actual number of physical dollars was missing, or stolen, or that no records had been kept. Just that oversight was complicated to the point that you couldn’t properly audit it.
And $2.3t is about 3 years worth of the DOD’s entire budget.
I don’t think the hearings ever happened, but they did reform the systems at fault. Even if they didn’t fix the problem entirely.
That’s sort of why most people are aware of this idea through the conspiracy theory. I don’t really recall it being all that big of a story or scandal at the time. It was a sort of wonky, policy thing. Though weirdly it did boil down to the Hawk’s Hawk Cheney complaining that it wasn’t possible to adequately audit the military.
