 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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