Tuesday, December 06, 2016

Pentagon buries evidence of 125 billion dollars in bureaucratic waste.

Thanks to John for the link!

via Washington Post.
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.
The study was produced last year by the Defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel of corporate executives, and consultants from McKinsey and Company. Based on reams of personnel and cost data, their report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management.
Story here. 

Everyone (myself included) has talked about rebuilding America's defense.  I've bitched about cuts in the combat power of the Army and Marine Corps...yet we see a Pentagon study that identified 125 billion dollars in waste?

And the answer is to give this bureaucracy more money?

Maybe the sequester needs to stay in place.  If they're going to hide this report from January two years ago then we're look at more than waste.  We're looking at fraud.

The Pentagon needs an enema.

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