Can anyone with a career military background comment?
Time for the next pres to go to the pentagon and clean house. This is only one reason.
Funding strong defense is one thing, funding waste and mismanagement another.
Downsizing a bloated government entity.
What a concept.
OK, I believe it readily.
Cutting there will provide many replacement workers for jobs emptied by the coming deportations. Good, honest work.
While I'm not sure of the need for a million of them, I see nothing wrong with using civilians and contractors for office work.
Ping!
How much of this is mandated bloat from on high. Diversity programs. Breast Cancer research. Small/disadvantaged business set-asides. Hell, re-doing the entire Navy Enlisted Rating system. . .
Michelle Obama is also paying for the kids school meals from a DOD budget. That should come from some other department, not DOD
Based upon ONLY what was posted as an exerpt:
The Federal Government has run for as long as I can remember on the budget theory, “if you didn’t spend all of your money, then you didn’t actually need it.” Thus causing good managers to spend end of year funds on what maybe be wasteful items. That budgeting process is detrimental to good budgeting procedures. Also, the cuts and/or additions to budgets need to be made based upon examining each service and program. It is easy to say “cut 10% across the board” but that leads to some cuts where ‘fat’ is truly trimmed and other areas where it is ‘muscle and bone’ being cut which ends up being harmful.
During and/or after the Vietnam War, the DoD shifted to using contractors to fill military positions as a means to reduce the numbers of military service members. The theory was that civilian contractors were cheaper, especially if a large number of the military stayed on active duty to their retirement date 20-30 years later.
There is wasteful spending within the DoD, it is just figuring out/digging out what is waste and what is needed.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
$125 Billion just in the military. Tip of the iceberg. Let’s see the waste all across the government.
Dr. Carson had better have some serious forensic accountants on his staff.
The Inspector General for HUD reported that 47% of the HUD budget was UNACCOUNTED for & there were lots of CASH payments.
No receipts. I am not talking about petty cash- I am talking about BILLIONS of missing dollars.
HUD is a disaster & the accountants have to stop the bleeding.
I can from an i/c bkgnd.
Money is wasted well. Many folks who are program managers on the govt side, are not really good program managers. Never really trained to be in the first place and people rotate to other jobs every few years.
Did this administration ever draw up an official fiscal budget?