Rand Paul Goes To Fort Knox To Verify That US Gold Stockpile Still Exists

In September 1974, amid public and congressional concerns, a high-profile inspection occurred at the U.S. Bullion Depository at Fort Knox. In a rare exception to the "no visitors" policy, members of Congress and the press were invited in.

This was followed immediately by a special audit conducted by the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) in cooperation with Treasury auditors. It covered roughly 21% of the gold bars stored there at the time and found that the holdings matched the depository records.  Since that event, there has been no independent audit of federal gold stores.  The contents of Fort Knox has remains a mystery.  

In 2024, the US treasury Department stated that Fort Knox held 4580 metric tons of gold in the vaults, but many fiscal conservatives have been skeptical.  It makes sense to be suspicious; why would the federal government avoid independent audits for over 50 years unless there's some kind of problem? 

The return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2025 presented a rare opportunity for the public to press for verification that Fort Knox is, in fact, still holding gold.  We are seeing some indication that the Trump Administration is taking these concerns seriously, with Senator Rand Paul being given access to Fort Knox vaults last week. 

I have been asking to see the gold at Fort Knox since February of 2025. This week I finally went deep underground and looked for myself. Yes, the gold is there, roughly 147 million ounces.

The real lesson is not the gold itself. It is what happened to the dollar after 1971, when…

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 14, 2026

Rand Paul's inspection of the gold stores does not constitute a true audit, but it is the first outside verification of the US gold stockpile in decades.  The audit of 1974 started with visual inspections, so this could potentially lead to a more thorough inventory down the road.  Rand Paul notes that the gold is, indeed, still sitting at Fort Knox.

"Yes, the gold is there, roughly 147 million ounces..."

After seeing it himself, Paul quickly moved past the question of whether the gold exists. "It is impressive, but the real point is what it still teaches in 2026," he wrote.  Paul pointed to 1971, when the U.S. ended the dollar's convertibility into gold, and said the currency has lost roughly 85% of its value since then.

Public worries have grown over the stability of the US economy since the credit crash of 2008-2009.  The Federal Reserve's massive bailout programs pumped trillions of dollars into the global monetary system and created the catalyst for an inflationary crisis.  Ron Paul's limited audit of the bailouts in 2011 found over $16 trillion in emergency loans at 0% interest over the course of 3 years.  A large portion of these loans went to foreign banks.  

Ron Paul's audit was not a full accounting of central bank activities.  We still don't know for certain how much dollar devaluation occurred. 

Since the credit crisis, the Fed has engaged in multiple QE measures and bailouts, keeping interest rates near 0% for approximately 7 years.  The pandemic bailouts in 2020-2021 were the straw that broke the camel's back, triggering the inflation crisis that alternative economists had been predicting.

Any reversal of long term inflationary pressures will likely require a return to a commodity backed currency standard, otherwise, the trend will continue until the dollar eventually breaks and the system crashes.  The confirmation by Rand Paul of the Fort Knox holdings offers hope that a return to the gold standard or a mixed commodity standard might one day be possible and that the US economy can still be saved from an inflationary spiral.