Economy Pentagon Buries Evidence of $125,000,000,000 in Bureaucratic Waste (And Nobody Seems To Care)

Renard said:
There must be shadow projects, and those shadow projects need to draw their funds from somewhere, and the true destination of those funds has to be obfuscated. I guess inefficiency is the more plausible, boring explanation. But come now, there must be shadow projects.
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they arent " Shadow projects". DARPA openly admits to quite a lot of what it is working on, and their budget is public. Like most information, it is not secret. People are just too lazy to look.

http://www.darpa.mil/about-us/budget
 
Can the people sue the government for misappropriating their tax dollars?
 
Pwent said:
guess how much we spend to get the $50 from the taxpayer to the person spending it
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Are you seriously trying to tell me you think its anywhere remotely close to $125,000,000,000?o_O

Pwent said:
those are two separate issues anyways
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How the fvk is it two separate issues? Both cases are welfare plain and simple. You just dont have a problem with the Pentagon wiping its arse with $125,000,000,000 because its the military you hypocrite.
 
Sohei said:
Are you seriously trying to tell me you think its anywhere remotely close to $125,000,000,000?o_O



How the fvk is it two separate issues? Both cases are welfare plain and simple. You just dont have a problem with the Pentagon wiping its arse with $125,000,000,000 because its the military you hypocrite.
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i have a problem with government overspending in the military and on welfare/entitlements

as i said in this thread

lol at ignoring that and pretending i support high military spending, because thats the only way you know how to argue your point
 
Misfit23 said:
Government has always been wasteful, doesn't matter what useless president sits in office.
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It seems that the mainstream media would rather tackle much more trivial figures if they can link it to certain Presidents they don't like though. Like how much it cost to provide security for a goft game.

Hundreds of billions in institutionalized bureaucratic waste? That's just business as usual, nothing to see here, and nothing will ever come out of the investigation.
 
55e0c1619dd7cc24008b6c64-750-979.png

So basically as much as the UK and France combined ....


This is also nearly 2x as much as the price tag on Bernie's Free College plan.

*edit: this is the 2015 budget; its like $30B higher for '18
 
We're going to have to hope that Omarosa has a tape about this or it will never be covered by the MSM for more than a blurb.
 
ShadowRun said:
Obviously Bush's fault or Trump's based on his racist rhetoric.

This is amazing though, didn't the state department misplace 6 billion awhile ago?
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Oh, so 8 years of Obummer has nothing to do with it? That’s convenient
 
300 level public economics. Business tries to increase profits, government agencies try to increase their size. There is not always an incentive to be efficient in government.
 
Arkain2K said:
The whole reason why the Military Industrial Complex is invincible is because the funds are distributed domestically...
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Amazing how many people don't realize this.
 
Arkain2K said:
Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste
By Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward
December 5, 2016​

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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.

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The data showed that the Defense Department was paying a staggering number of people — 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel — to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines. That workforce supports 1.3 million troops on active duty, the fewest since 1940.

The cost-cutting study could find a receptive audience with President-elect Donald Trump. He has promised a major military buildup and said he would pay for it by “eliminating government waste and budget gimmicks.”

For the military, the major allure of the study was that it called for reallocating the $125 billion for troops and weapons. Among other options, the savings could have paid a large portion of the bill to rebuild the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal, or the operating expenses for 50 Army brigades.

But some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper.

So the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website.

“They’re all complaining that they don’t have any money. We proposed a way to save a ton of money,” said Robert “Bobby” L. Stein, a private-equity investor from Jacksonville, Fla., who served as chairman of the Defense Business Board.

Stein, a campaign bundler for President Obama, said the study’s data were “indisputable” and that it was “a travesty” for the Pentagon to suppress the results.

“We’re going to be in peril because we’re spending dollars like it doesn’t matter,” he added.

The missed opportunity to streamline the military bureaucracy could soon have large ramifications. Under the 2011 Budget Control Act, the Pentagon will be forced to stomach $113 billion in automatic cuts over four years unless Congress and Trump can agree on a long-term spending deal by October. Playing a key role in negotiations will probably be Trump’s choice for defense secretary, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis.

The Defense Business Board was ordered to conduct the study by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, the Pentagon’s second-highest-ranking official. At first, Work publicly touted the efficiency drive as a top priority and boasted about his idea to recruit corporate experts to lead the way.

After the board finished its analysis, however, Work changed his position. In an interview with The Post, he did not dispute the board’s findings about the size or scope of the bureaucracy. But he dismissed the $125 billion savings proposal as “unrealistic” and said the business executives had failed to grasp basic obstacles to restructuring the public sector.

“There is this meme that we’re some bloated, giant organization,” he said. “Although there is a little bit of truth in that . . . I think it vastly overstates what’s really going on.”

Work said the board fundamentally misunderstood how difficult it is to eliminate federal civil service jobs — members of Congress, he added, love having them in their districts — or to renegotiate defense contracts.

He said the Pentagon is adopting some of the study’s recommendations on a smaller scale and estimated it will save $30 billion by 2020. Many of the programs he cited, however, have been on the drawing board for years or were unrelated to the Defense Business Board’s research.

Work acknowledged that the push to improve business operations lost steam after then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was replaced by Ashton B. Carter in February 2015. Carter has emphasized other goals, such as strengthening the Pentagon’s partnerships with high-tech firms.

“We will never be as efficient as a commercial organization,” Work said. “We’re the largest bureaucracy in the world. There’s going to be some inherent inefficiencies in that.”

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Read the complete report here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/inve...b0774c1eaa5_story.html?utm_term=.a90690e50314
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“Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.”

Kinda lost me from the get go.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/...udget-authorization-months-ahead-of-schedule/

717million more ,lol...doesn’t seem like there argument of defense spending cuts holds much weight.

The fact that both parties have let the military lobby/ complex/depts pillage tax money to the current extent is disgusting.

“A pox on both of your house”
 
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