Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste

[NobodyHere]

Source: MSN.com

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.

Read more: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pentagon-buries-evidence-of-dollar125-billion-in-bureaucratic-waste/ar-AAlbC2l?li=BBnbcA1

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As a veteran this does not surprise me.

There are way too many DOD contractors and civilians.

Remember that the first rule of government is that your department never has enough money and that you only get by through the miraculous efforts of your workers.

[niyad]

1. well, that is what they will admit to, anyway.

[DeminPennswoods]

2. Too many contractors for sure

As a civilian DoD'er, I was always way outnumbered by contractors in the many meetings I attended. Then the civil servants were the ones tasked with getting all the information together and making sure actions were actually done. The contractors went on their merry way and started bugging us practically the next day for the info and answers to pass along to the folks who hired them as if it was their hard work. Nothing frosted me more.

[lonestarnot]

3. And whatever is doled out in the budget must be spent or taken away next year.

[ancianita]

4. It disappears across black market rackets they passively participate in. Or we wouldn't still be in

a number of countries low in international market participation. It's convenient for the Pentagon that we not know much about that, though each year, over the last couple of years, it admits it doesn't know where over a trillion dollars went.

If the Pentagon wants to make a big show of frugality, it does it at home, and probably wants to automate here in the US.

While automating and outsourcing seem cost effective, they remove Americans with awareness, consciences and the ability to collection evidence of waste, abuse and fraud.

The more of such changes the Pentagon makes, the more they remove civilian monitoring.

The biggest black hole of taxpayer dollars in all of empire history.