Rand Paul Confirms Fort Knox Has Gold, but Not Every Ounce

U.S. Senator Rand Paul (KY-R) went inside the U.S. Bullion Depository at Fort Knox earlier this month and emerged with a blunt answer to one of America’s most lasting conspiracy theories: Yes, the gold is there.

Paul requested an audit in February 2025 after President Donald Trump and Elon Musk questioned whether the gold remained. He sought to inspect the reserves himself, arguing that greater transparency would ease public doubts.

After the visit, Paul said in an Aug. 14 post on X that he went “deep underground” and saw roughly 147 million ounces. “It is impressive,” he wrote.

His estimate matches the official figure. The U.S. Mint reports that Fort Knox holds 147,341,858.382 fine troy ounces of gold, more than half of the federal government’s reported 261.5 million ounces. The remaining balance of gold is stored at other locations.

Paul did not publish photographs from inside the vault, leaving the public with his account but no new visual record of the gold.

What Paul Saw at Fort Knox

The depository began receiving gold in 1937 and rarely admits visitors. The previous highly publicized visit came in 2017, when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin entered with Kentucky officials and members of Congress.

The government values the Fort Knox holdings at the statutory price of $42.22 an ounce, placing their book value at about $6.22 billion. That price is fixed by law and far below market value, which can confuse discussion of what the reserve is worth.

Paul saw a vast bullion stockpile, but his visit did not verify its amount or purity.

What an Old Government Audit Shows

The official gold total rests on a decades-old government audit system.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General audits the Mint’s reported deep-storage gold and silver reserves each year. Its latest report, covering fiscal years 2025 and 2024, concluded that the reported balances were fairly presented in all material respects.

Amid public doubts in 1974, the Government Accountability Office inventoried three of Fort Knox’s 13 vault compartments. Auditors checked depository records while counting the contents, and they recorded purity tests on selected bars. They found no discrepancies.

In 1975, Treasury created a committee to oversee continuing audits of government-owned gold. According to a 2011 GAO review, about 92% of that gold had been audited by 1986. By the end of fiscal 2008, GAO or Treasury auditors had observed every one of the 42 deep-storage compartments at Fort Knox, Denver and West Point.

The Gold and the Dollar

Paul used Fort Knox’s gold as a prop for his longstanding argument that the Fed is making Americans and the nation poorer, not wealthier. He reasons that ending dollar-gold convertibility in 1971 freed Washington to expand the money supply while eroding the currency’s purchasing power.

Fort Knox gave Paul a striking backdrop. It does not make his case against the Fed any more compelling. The argument still falls flat, not because Paul is wrong, but because people’s eyes glaze over as soon as the conversation turns to monetary policy.