Spence
02-14-2006, 11:16 AM
From his earliest days in office, George W. Bush has talked a good game about transforming the military. He even hired a corporate turnaround specialist, Donald Rumsfeld, to accomplish the task. But after Bush proposed a nearly half-trillion dollar defense budget for fiscal 2007 earlier this month—one that doesn’t include many of the costs of the Iraq war—even some of the president’s loyalists were appalled. One of them, Kori Schake, who until recently was director of defense strategy on Bush’s National Security Council, last Thursday wrote a blistering op-ed in The New York Times headlined “Jurassic Pork.” She noted that Rumsfeld's supposedly transformational Quadrennial Defense Review looks little different from four years ago, and that the latest budget “continues programs and practices that have been made obsolete by technology, innovation and field experience.”
But that’s only part of the story. The untold tale is the wastage and overpricing that continue to lard up the Pentagon budget to the tune of perhaps $100 billion, with Congress scarcely paying attention. In some cases, corporate welfare-type programs that were launched in the ’90s—at a time the Clinton administration felt defense contractors needed help because of post-Cold War budget cuts—are still on the books. And today they are feathering the bottom lines of giant companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, even though Big Defense has long since returned to health.
Even some well-meaning reform programs have backfired because of lax oversight by the Pentagon. On Tuesday, Congress will begin hearings on a General Accounting Office report concluding that $8 billion in “incentive fees” given to defense companies over the past three-and-a-half years were largely a waste of taxpayer dollars. The fees were intended as a reward to contractors for delivering faster results and coming in under price. Instead, the GAO says, companies were given incentive fees on 597 contracts for doing nothing.Read the whole thing. It's depressing, but important.
Source (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11326239/site/newsweek/)
But that’s only part of the story. The untold tale is the wastage and overpricing that continue to lard up the Pentagon budget to the tune of perhaps $100 billion, with Congress scarcely paying attention. In some cases, corporate welfare-type programs that were launched in the ’90s—at a time the Clinton administration felt defense contractors needed help because of post-Cold War budget cuts—are still on the books. And today they are feathering the bottom lines of giant companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, even though Big Defense has long since returned to health.
Even some well-meaning reform programs have backfired because of lax oversight by the Pentagon. On Tuesday, Congress will begin hearings on a General Accounting Office report concluding that $8 billion in “incentive fees” given to defense companies over the past three-and-a-half years were largely a waste of taxpayer dollars. The fees were intended as a reward to contractors for delivering faster results and coming in under price. Instead, the GAO says, companies were given incentive fees on 597 contracts for doing nothing.Read the whole thing. It's depressing, but important.
Source (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11326239/site/newsweek/)