$125 Billion in Pentagon Bureaucratic Waste Gets Buried: “All the crap is going to float to the surface and stink the place up.”

Pentagon Building showing smoke rising from the building after the 9/11 attack. (Photo: Public Domain)

December 7, 2016

Written by Lorra B.

A project by the Pentagon to make their operation more efficient has backfired and instead exposed much more wasteful spending than expected.

According to The 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.”

A report was issued in Jan. 2015 outlining a five-year plan for the Defense Department to save a whopping $125 billion by eliminating “the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.”

According to the report, the Pentagon’s ‘back-office bureaucracy’ employed over 1 million people with 23 percent of the defense budget ($580 billion in total) going for back-office operations.

That means that there are just about as many people working in the Pentagon offices as there are active-duty troops serving our country.

Because the Pentagon feared they would endure more cuts instead of allocating more funds for the troops, the 77-page report was hushed and removed from it’s website.

A private-equity investor, Robert L. Stein, stated, “They’re all complaining that they don’t have any money. We proposed a way to save a ton of money.”

But the Pentagon suppressed the results.

Stein went on to say, “We’re going to be in peril because we’re spending dollars like it doesn’t matter.”

This all means that unless Congress and Trump can reach a spending deal agreement by October there will be an automatic cut over four years of $113 billion.

The Pentagon’s second highest ranking official, Deputy Defense Secretary, Robert O. Work, did not dispute the findings of bureaucratic waste, “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.”

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

Does it?

The Pentagon, however, is taking some of the recommendations made by the report, but on a smaller scale. The plan is to save $30 billion by 2020.

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

The data is being collected and analyzed as never before. Just what consequences will come of it is yet to be seen.

Former executive of Medco Health Solutions, Kenneth Klepper, summed the situation up nicely when he told Work, “You are about to turn on the light in a very dark room. All the crap is going to float to the surface and stink the place up.”

 

Written by Lorra B.