“Waste, fraud, and abuse” can at times be an empty talking point in politics. But at the Pentagon, it is the standard operating procedure.
On Monday, an investigative report from the Washington Post offered the latest evidence:
The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.
Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.
The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.
The Pentagon has never completed an audit and is not likely to comply with the requirement that it achieve “audit-readiness” by next September. According to a report from the DOD inspector general this past summer, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service could not provide written documentation for $6.5 trillion worth of year-end financial adjustments. The “epic waste” at the Pentagon has been well-documented by journalists but ignored by politicians.
And we haven’t even touched the broader questions of whether the US should even have military bases everywhere, give military aid to affluent countries, or use weapon-building as an industrial policy.
Nevertheless, the National Defense Authorization Act sails through with wide bipartisan support each year, with bigger and bigger budgets for the military (even though the only real existential threat to the US is climate change). Democrats and Republicans routinely toss away their concerns about “fiscal responsibility” when it comes to the Pentagon — deficits and debts are only useful to invoke when you want to thwart social expenditures or temper demands.
The conference bill of the FY 2017 NDAA authorizes $619 billion, $3.2 billion more than President Obama’s budget request with no equivalent increase in domestic spending (a demand Democrats always make and then vote for the war spending boosts anyway). Congress continued its habit of using the Overseas Contingency Operations fund (a Pentagon slush fund) as a way to evade sequestration for the military.
The bill contains, among other things, $1.2 billion for the ongoing war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and for the training and assisting of the Syrian opposition forces,; $3.4 billion for the European Reassurance Initiative (a program strengthening NATO) along with $350 million to train and equip Ukrainian security forces; $600 million for the Israeli missile defense system; $3.2 billion for Readiness Stabilization Funding to stop the drawdown of troop levels; and the preservation of existing bans on the closure of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility or the transfer of inmates.
As I wrote last Friday, the House passed the NDAA 375 to 34.
Earlier today, the Senate passed the NDAA easily as well, with a vote of 92 to 7.
The 7 consisted of two Republicans and five Democrats.
The two Republicans were Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY0.
The five Democrats were Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Ed Markey (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Ron Wyden (D-OR).
Ron Wyden is the only one on the Democratic side to have issued a statement on his vote:
“This bloated defense bill is exactly what Americans hate about politics as usual. It increases defense spending by billions at the same time Republicans insist we can’t afford to pay to repair our roads and bridges, support Oregon’s timber counties or fix wildfire funding. It breaks last year’s bipartisan budget deal. And once again, this bill does far too little to restore fiscal accountability at the Pentagon and ensure the Defense Department is audit-ready by next year, or ever,” Wyden said.
I support fully funding the troops who keep our country safe, and ensuring that scandals like the one affecting National Guard bonuses don’t happen again.”
Merkley and Sanders have made similar statements in the past, and Merkley, Sanders, and Wyden were the only three senators to vote against the NDAA last year. Kirsten Gillibrand’s opposition may have to do with Congress’s (shameful) failure to pass her Military Justice Improvement Act and take the steps required to protect victims of rape in the military.