The story went live at The Washington Post this evening and is based on the paper’s access to internal documents, including the study. It is titled Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste and was authored by Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward. Yes, that Bob Woodward.
Here are the three opening paragraphs, and note the hotlink to the report itself:
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.
There is a lot of detail in the article, including back and forth between top Pentagon officials, the fact that problems like this have been known for some time but the constant turnover of SecDefs has previously been a reason why there was not serious followup.
And why was it buried? Because top officials worried that if Congress saw this, and that this $125 Billion that could be saved would be used in lieu of the increases in funding for which the Pentagon has asked to cover things like new weapons systems.
And oh by the way — there are 448,000 civilians and 268,000 contractors in the back office functions of the Pentagon, compared to 298,000 out of the total of 1.3 million active duty military involved in these functions. As bad as the the heavy number of civilians are (in part because Congressmen like those jobs in their districts) one should realize that contractors cost a hell of a lot more — sometimes almost 200,000/year each.
Read the article.
It will turn your stomach.
It is bloat of the worst kind.