I hope MoveOn mobilizes people on the pending $25 billion in corporate welfare for Boeing. The Senate Armed Services Committee is on the verge of approving the deal, and it must be stopped.
You've probably heard about the proposed refueling tanker deal, where the Air Force wants to lease a fleet of 767s for a great deal more than it would cost to purchase them outright. Now, a new Washington Post story uncovers the way that the Bush administration and key Congresspersons are needlessly squandering billions, "even though the Air Force had not even listed tankers among its 'unfunded priorities' in 2001."
As with Halliburton, Boeing landed a no-bid contract and sidestepped oversight and review committees. The deal is opposed by the GAO, the OMB, and the CBO, but it's getting pushed through, anyway.
Here are key grafs from this lengthy Post story:
[W]ith [Andrew] Card's intervention, obstacles to the deal eventually fell away. Vehement objections raised by OMB and Pentagon budget analysts -- that the planes were too expensive and that leasing would set a bad precedent -- were muted or withdrawn.
...
Card's intervention was but one fruit of a two-year lobbying campaign, mounted jointly by the Air Force and Boeing, that has brought the $21 billion to $25 billion deal within one congressional hurdle of being passed.
...
The Air Force, under current budgeting, cannot afford to buy so many aircraft at once. Leasing would permit it to pay less up front, although it would ultimately pay as much as $5.7 billion more overall.
...
In getting this far, the Air Force never conducted a formal study of alternatives to leasing new tankers, as is standard, and it did not formally study the degree of age-related damage to its existing tankers. It never conducted a formal competition before signing the contract, or arranged to test the new tankers before committing to lease all of them.
The deal was approved by a new Pentagon leasing review panel that operates with a fraction of the oversight and regulatory control associated with such recent military acquisitions as the Joint Strike Fighter, the FA-22 attack fighter and Stryker armored vehicle. It is the first in a series of big leases the Pentagon is contemplating, all of which push costs into the future.
Some Pentagon officials remain convinced that the tanker leasing agreement, signed by the Air Force in July, does not meet federal accounting standards, a view shared by the General Accounting Office. Two weeks ago, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said it was actually a purchase disguised as a lease, making it "significantly more costly" than a normal purchase.
Ordinarily, such costly military systems are procured after being included in formal budget proposals, which lead to congressional hearings and votes in committees and on the House and Senate floors. In this case, no hearings were held or committee votes taken before the deal was approved in the House and in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Again, the entire lengthy article is here.