by Mark C. Eades
If, like me, you are “of a certain age,” you may recall the scandal nearly 40 years ago when it was revealed that the Department of Defense was shelling out more than $600 each to buy plastic toilet seats for military aircraft. At the same time, it emerged that the Pentagon was paying as much as $74,165 for an aluminum ladder, $7,622 for a coffee maker, $2,228 for a monkey wrench, and $659 for an ashtray, among other absurdly overpriced goods purchased with Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars. It was the “$600 toilet seat,” however, that in my youth became the quintessential catch phrase for government waste.
At around the same time, students at the inner-city high school in San Francisco where I first entered the teaching profession had to bring toilet paper from home due to budget cuts led by one of California’s last Republican governors; and I’m pretty sure that the cold, rickety old toilet seats upon which we all sat in the school’s restrooms cost a lot less than $600. America always knows where its spending priorities are, and they usually seem to be in all the wrong places.
On defense spending, little if anything has changed in the past four decades, except that prices have gone up — way up. By 2018, the cost of a toilet seat for military aircraft had risen to as high as $10,000. Yes, that’s right: $10,000 for a plastic ring through which to tinkle, blow mud, pinch a loaf, or drop a coiler. In 2016, the Defense Department commissioned a study that found $125 billion in administrative waste, then quickly buried the study and “imposed secrecy restrictions” on its findings “amid concerns the findings would give Congress an excuse to further slash defense spending.” With almost half of the Pentagon’s budget each year going to the for-profit defense industry, the out-of-control “waste, greed, and fraud” in defense spending amounts to a massive transfer of public money into unscrupulous private hands.
You won’t hear Republicans talk about cutting Pentagon waste, though, because that would cut into profits for their defense industry campaign contributors, defense industry lobbyists, and their clients; and perhaps even affect investments that members of Congress themselves have in the defense industry. Since 1990, according to OpenSecrets, the defense industry has made more than $385 million in campaign contributions, mostly to Republicans. In presidential election year 2020 alone, the defense industry made more than $50 million in campaign contributions, and in midterm election year 2022 the industry made more than $32 million in contributions, again mostly to Republicans. Since 2005, the defense industry has also spent more than $100 million each year on lobbying, including more than $123 million in 2022. These amounts spent on campaign contributions and lobbying by the defense industry are tiny compared to the profits they have reaped, for items such as $10,000 toilet seats, from your tax dollars and mine.
Members of Congress — yet again mostly Republicans, but also many Democrats — who have their own money invested in the defense industry include Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine, Rick Scott of Florida, and John Hoeven of North Dakota, each of whom had more than $100,000 in defense industry investments reported in 2020. That same year, however, Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island was reported to have nearly $350,000 in defense industry investments, while California senator and my former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein had $650,000 invested in Boeing, which produces military aircraft and missile systems as well as civilian aircraft. Members of Congress with their own money invested in the defense industry include members of both the House and Senate armed services committees responsible for authorizing the defense budget each year,
This is one more good reason to ban members of Congress from making individual stock trades (Which won’t happen, of course, because too many members of Congress love having sources of income in addition to the $174,000 per year plus benefits that taxpayers pay them to show up at the Capitol one or two days a week and do the minimum amount of work that a human being can possibly do without dropping dead from sheer physical and mental inactivity).
For all these reasons, you won’t hear many members of Congress from either party talk about cutting Pentagon waste, but you will hear a lot of Republicans talk about cutting social spending and “entitlements” (i.e., spending that doesn’t benefit themselves or their wealthy campaign contributors, but does benefit ordinary Americans whose tax dollars pay their congressional salaries, provide a lot of profit for the defense industry, and a lot of very expensive toilet seats for the armed forces of the United States). These Republican members of Congress, of course, are the same Republicans who always demand more tax cuts for the rich, ballooning the deficit so that they can then demand more cuts to social spending and “entitlements.”
Wasteful defense spending is a corrupt money-go-round, and that’s what should be getting the axe, not the social spending and “entitlements” that ordinary Americans pay for, depend on, and deserve. Let the Pentagon buy toilet seats at Wal-Mart like everyone else.
Mark C. Eades is a California voter and member of Democrats Abroad currently living and working in Asia.