Posted on 12/06/2016 5:41:08 AM PST by NYer
Senior defense officials suppressed a study documenting $125 billion worth of administrative waste at the Pentagon out of fears that Congress would use its findings to cut the defense budget, the Washington Post reported late Monday.
The report, which was issued in January 2015 by the advisory Defense Business Board (DBB), called for a series of reforms that would have saved the department $125 billion over the next five years.
Among its other findings, the report showed that the Defense Department was paying just over 1 million contractors, civilian employees and uniformed personnel to fill back-office jobs. That number nearly matches the amount of active duty troops — 1.3 million, the lowest since 1940.
The Post reported that some Pentagon leaders feared the study's findings would undermine their claims that years of budget sequestration had left the military short of money. In response, they imposed security restrictions on information used in the study and even pulled a summary report from a Pentagon website.
"They’re all complaining that they don’t have any money," former DBB chairman Robert Stein told the Post. "We proposed a way to save a ton of money."
Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, who originally ordered the study, told the paper that the plan laid out in the report was "unrealistic."
"There is this meme that we’re some bloated, giant organization,” Work said. “Although there is a little bit of truth in that ... I think it vastly overstates what’s really going on."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I hope Mad Dog can get this under control. I know two guys that did 25 years in the military, retired and took the pension and then got rehired as civilians to do the same job they were doing when they were NCO’s.
I’ll give you an example...in the 2011 period, I worked as a civilian for a military group. I was in effect the purchaser. So, the group had a lot of worn out office chairs and based on comments by everyone....we prioritized our funding and went to do research to buy some decent chairs.
My pick...some ergonomic chair with a 12-year guarantee...delivered to the building. The price was listed in the GSA catalog and was probably 10 to 15 percent below the normal price. So I needed roughly 225 chairs.
I did all the paperwork (roughly 12 pages)...demonstrated the research, and how it met all the requirements. Then the authority over pulled out this stupid rule....I had to buy via a minority or women-owned company. I was able to buy about fifty-percent of my preferred chairs at the GSA rate. The other fifty percent was 25-percent higher (note HIGHER) than what GSA was going to charge. It was a totally different brand...different look...etc.
I sat for two hours looking at this mess and arguing with the folks about this rule. I had to go and find somewhere in our budget...more cash to pay for the extra cost.
Then I looked at this woman-owned company. It’s an odd thing. It’s an address of a farm in central Pennsylvania next to a corn-field. Yeah....just a farm house.
What this gal had done was form her own one-person company. She got certified as a federal approved site. She represented a Canadian chair company. She paid some guy for a listing of contracts coming up in the DC area....giving him a cut of the profit. Because I’m forced (like so many) then the odds are that she will make over $50,000 a year in profit easily. The system is rigged. I spent more money than I should have, for the product.
How much is wasted by the Pentagon in the DC area each year like this? I’d bet on $300 million easily. Chairs, renovation, presentation units, computers, teleconference equipment, etc. That only covers the DC area alone. So then go global and look at the various services who are forced to play the same game.
But then you go and look at Homeland Security, National Parks, etc....they do the same thing. You could cut 10-percent off the national budget very easily by eliminating stupid rules like this.
I am currently a contractor for DoD, doing the same kind of work that I did until I retired about 11 months ago.
I (and others) retired because the Obama administration directed that the Army downsize. However the work that I did still needed to be done. So they hired me (and others) a retired officer, to work two cubicles down from where I worked on active duty.
Most contractors are doing useful work, that troops are no longer available to do. However, I can easily see $125M in waste because DoD processes are very bureaucratic and inefficient.
Thanks for the example. What a mess.
The last time they couldn’t account for a couple of billion bucks they tried to blow up the Pentagon.
Some of it is due to the military’s requirement to move the uniformed personnel every three or four years.
They saw the need to have continuity and experience in some offices.
This led to the influx of “Little Old Ladies In Tennis Shoes”.
They were lower level GS civilian employees who would be in an office for years to provide the corporate knowledge to the uniformed personnel who rotated through the office every few years.
But, as with all bureaucracies, it got out of control.
Corporate knowledge is power and the civilians came to think of themselves as the real bosses.
The uniformed personnel became a foreign legion. Necessary only for overseas service.
And of course, those entrenched civilians could be counted on to vote Democrat. The uniformed personnel were moving every few years. A lot of them didn’t even vote.
So, the bureaucracy grew.
That civilian employee needed help and the answer was more civilian employees.
Take a look again at the original article. There are nearly as many civilians in the Department of Defense as there are uniformed personnel.
In a former life, I was an instructor and course developer for a U.S. Military school. I was frequently pressured to give contractors course development work to do, for which the contractor had no contract. At the same time, the Civil Service employees did not have sufficient work to fill their shift. After telling my supervisor that I thought that was illegal and I would not go to jail for him, my work assignments were drastically altered and over my last year prior to retirement, I had no work. Damned right there is bloat, fraud waste and abuse in the Pentagon system.
My team at the FDIC had to have set a record, when we had two contractors voluntarily withdraw from their contracts, because we were too tough on them, i.e. we followed the contracts to the letter.
It just dawned on me that if Trump is successful at making significant reductions in waste, fraud, and abuse that it could be the literal end of the ‘Rat party. If the taxpayers aren’t funding, through $125 billion missing dollars type ‘errors’ - where will the ‘Rats get their money since the general public won’t be providing it?
You got it... DEFUND the left, by eliminating all the pork that ends up back in their coffers.
Don’t lose sight of the fact this information is being released now, just before Trump is sworn in. This waste happened on Obama’s watch, but the left is working to make sure Trump pays for it, claiming the DoD suddenly requires greater scrutiny than when their “god” was Commander-in-chief. My guess is that after Obama’s gone, the press will suddenly discover the homeless again too.
My experience is that the DOD has a table of allowances regulation which says people in this rank are authorized furniture with these NSNs and people in that rank are authorized furniture with those NSNs. A unit can go for many years without having the furniture that’s authorized by regulation. You submit the paperwork to HHQ so that if there’s any “fallout money,” money from elsewhere in the organization that’s excess to the needs of that section for the fiscal year, you might be able to get a fraction of the amount you requested to buy a desk or two. That’s the view from a worker bee perspective.
These clowns in this article should be charged under RICO. They not only wasted money, but then they classified the facts of the waste so that any whistleblower could be charged with espionage for divulging it. Brazen and shameless.
Regarding women owned companies and DoD contracts:
Over twenty years ago I was detailed to investigate a small procurement case at an Air Force base where fraud was committed. There were lots of problems with the contract, but one part of it related to this minority and women owned companies business. The contractor who committed the fraud had set up a series of companies over the years with his wife as the owner on paper. He kept getting contracts based on her anatomy, getting advanced payments, then absconding with the money without finishing the work. The next shell company would be set up using his wife’s private parts as an edge in getting the contract and the whole mess would be replicated again.
I retired from the service shortly thereafter and wanted to forget I ever saw that. It made the blood pressure go too high.
Big chuck of THOSE are Intelligence, not Defense, or so the Washington Post states. . . I know Liberty Crossing and Belvoir North are post-2001
The whole end of year rush to spend everything in the budget is wasteful. So much crap is bought just because someone put the paperwork in even though it was on the fantasy wish list, not the needs list. I’ve seen plenty of things that were bought one year and then bought again at end of year the next because someone forgot to update the list.
The problem is if you budget for contingencies and don’t spend it, they won’t budget for it next year. Then if something happens the following year, you have to choose which item you really needed has to be cut.
The whole incentive is to amass and spend the budget. The incentives to save are miniscule, and usually the reward for saving is wish list morale spending, cancelling out a significant part of the benefit.
Bottom line - incentives need to be changed somehow.
If the Pentagon is actually bloated, this is actually an insult to our troops. It would mean that military men are being cut and equipment grows old and disrepaired while money is wasted on all these “back office” positions.
(And yet, cutting defense spending is unpatriotic?)
I can’t wait until Mad Dog is in charge.
PING!
I sat and watched an Alaska-Indian-owned company take over a European contract. They set the pay so low, that a majority of the long-term guys just said enough and left. Those new guys hired? Most stayed a year and would move over to another company/another contract....that paid realistic compensation.
I asked one of the employees if he’d met any of the Indians, and he just laughed. There were two or three middle guys that ran everything, and simply gave the tribe some distribution of funds once a year....for use of the tribal name. He figured within a decade that virtually every single company that dealt with the US military on contracts would be some Indian tribal group....in name only. He guessed that one of the Alaskan Senators was behind the whole thing.
Some of them are as bad as rappers with the size of their posses.
There are way too many generals commanding desks at the Pentagon, slots that could be handled by Colonels and LT Cols. I have my bias in that regard. I filled a LT Col's spot for 18 months as a Captain with barely a year time in grade.
A bit of a caveat, though. The Colonel who put me in that slot was my last Battalion Commander in Germany, and I was his S-4 (as a 1st LT) for his last 18 months in command, while he led our battalion from a C-3 to a C-1.
By the time we both returned to the States, I could often predict what he wanted done.
$125 Billion just in the military. Tip of the iceberg. Let’s see the waste all across the government.
There is way too much of this gaming the system.
I suspect that Trump’s tweet about canceling the AF1 contract is just a way to open up the needed conversation that leads to trying to push back on some of this.
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting to see this actually change anything, but this is the right time to give it a good go (it would take years and probably never be 100% successful -— but let’s get started).
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