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Pentagon loses $500M in Yemen, gets $96B budget increase from Congress
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[March 28, 2015]  By Eric Boehm | Watchdog.org
 
 If employees of the federal government went to Las Vegas and managed to lose $500 million in taxpayer dollars at the slot machines and roulette wheel, there would be expected and understandable outrage from Congress.

But in another desert half-a-world away, employees of the federal government recently lost $500 million in taxpayer-funded supplies.

Photo via Wiki Commons
Photo via Wiki Commons
NO ACCOUNTABILITY, MORE MONEY: The budget approved by the U.S. House on Wednesday hands the Pentagon a $96 billion increase – about $40 million more than the Pentagon’s own top officials requested.
The result? A big budgetary increase for their department in the federal budget passed Wednesday by the U.S. House of Representatives.

It’s something that can only happen to the Pentagon, the one part of the federal government that seems immune to Republicans’ belt-tightening.

The budget approved Wednesday will cut $5.5 trillion in federal spending over the next decade, according to Republican number-crunchers, but it would reverse military spending cuts imposed by the sequester and boost the Pentagon’s budget by $96 billion by funneling the money into off-budget accounts supposedly used for war funding.
 


“We cannot let fiscal sanity and national security be juxtaposed as opponents,” Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., told the New York Times. “It’s like trying to discern which wing on an airplane is more important. You can’t have one without the other.”

So don’t try to talk to Franks about what’s being going on in Yemen, where the military has lost track of $500 million of equipment and weapons. The working theory, as the Washington Post outlined last week, is the goods were seized by a combination of Iranian-backed rebels and a contingent of Al-Queda that operates in the country.

The missing equipment includes a few hundred guns, more than a million rounds of ammunition, four hand-launched drones and body armor. Then it really starts to get weird. According to Washington Post, the military has also misplaced three airplanes, four helicopters and 160 (not a typo) Humvees.

How do you “lose” 160 armored trucks?

If the Pentagon had literally lost all that cash at the casino, it would arguably be a better outcome. Given the choice, I’d rather have my money lining the pockets of a sleazy gambling boss than have weapons and vehicles purchased with my money in the hands of foreign terrorists.

You might expect that learning the Pentagon simply couldn’t account for half-a-billion-dollars’ worth of stuff should be a big deal, particularly when that news breaks in the middle of a congressional debate over the size of the military budget.

Unfortunately, in Washington, that’s just the way things go.

That’s because literally no one has any idea whether the Pentagon spends its money well — although even the casual observer has good reason to suspect it doesn’t.

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For starters, no major part of the Defense Department has ever passed a federal audit.

The agency within the Pentagon charged with auditing contracts between the department and the private sector has a backlog of 24,000 audits and counting.

The Government Accountability Office once concluded — after attempting to audit one small part of the Pentagon — that as much as 58 percent of the material owned by the Pentagon are items it doesn’t need. And that was all the way back in 2000, before the spending increases brought on by the War on Afghanistan, the War in Iraq and the hopelessly-ill-defined War on Terror.

Why should the Pentagon have to deal with silly things like audits and actual accountability when it gets blank checks from Congress year-after-year, regardless of who is in charge?

Writing at Cato, Benjamin Freeman makes a compelling case that what passes for “strategy” at the Pentagon is anything but.

“Strategy, by definition, requires prioritization among competing threats and methods of defending against them,” he wrote last month. “Our government uses that word to rationalize the avoidance of those choices. The primacy theory that best describes our approach to security is really a justification for a log-roll of disparate military interests and goals, most only vaguely related to our safety.”

The austerity imposed on the Pentagon — since 2010, military spending declined almost 25 percent, enough to give congressional war hawks feverish nightmares — did nothing to force the department to make actual choices between goals, Freeman argues.
 


If the Republican majority in Congress was serious about being fiscal stewards for a national government desperately in need of some fiscal stewardship, they would hold the Pentagon to the same standards as other parts of the federal spending machine.

Instead, the budget approved Wednesday actually spends about $40 billion more than the Pentagon requested. The message is clear: waste money, lose equipment, don’t budget in any meaningful way and you’ll still end up with more money than you wanted in the first place.

With respect to Franks, fiscal sanity and national security — at least, “national security” as defined by the Pentagon’s brass and members of Congress — have been opponents for a long time.

Fiscal sanity hasn’t won too many of those fights. It lost another round on Wednesday.

[This article courtesy of Watchdog.]

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