Why is the Most Wasteful Government Agency Ignored in Deficit Hysteria?
Sunday, September 4th, 2011by David Morris
(reprinted from the Houston Peace and Justice Center, http://www.hpjc.org/node/275)
U.S. military spending now exceeds the spending of all other countries combined.
In all the talk about the federal deficit, why is the single largest culprit
left out of the conversation? Why is the one part of government that best
epitomizes everything conservatives say they hate about government—- waste, incompetence, and corruption—all but exempt from conservative criticism?
Of course, I’m talking about the Pentagon. Any serious battle plan to reducethe deficit must take on the Pentagon. In 2011 military spending accounted for
more than 58 percent of all federal discretionary spending and even more if the
interest on the federal debt that is related to military spending were added. In
the last ten years we have spent more than $7.6 trillion on military and
homeland security according to the National Priorities Project.
In the last decade military spending has soared from $300 billion to $700 billion.
When debt ceilings and deficits seem to be the
only two items on Washington’s agenda, it is both revealing and tragic that both
parties give a free pass to military spending. Representative Paul Ryan’s much
discussed Tea Party budget accepted Obama’s proposal for a pathetic $78 billion
reduction in military spending over 5 years, a recommendation that would only
modestly slow the rate of growth of military spending.
Indeed, the Republican government battering ram appears to have stopped at
the Pentagon door. This was evident early on. As soon as they took over the
House of Representatives, Republicans changed the rules so that military
spending does not have to be offset by reduced spending somewhere else, unlike
any other kind of government spending. It is the only activity of government
they believe does not have to be paid for. Which brings to mind a bit of wisdom from one of their heroes, Adam Smith. “Were the expense of war to be defrayed always by revenue raised within the year … wars would in general be more speedily concluded, and less wantonly undertaken.”
The Tea Party revolution has only strengthened the Republican Party’s resolve
that the Pentagon’s budget is untouchable. An analysis by the Heritage
Foundation of Republican votes on defense spending found that Tea Party freshmen
were even more likely than their Republican elders to vote against cutting any
part of the military budget.
What makes the hypocrisy even more revealing is that the Pentagon turns out
to be the poster child for government waste and incompetence.
In 2009 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found “staggering” cost overruns of almost $300 billion in nearly 70 percent of the Pentagon’s 96 major weapons. What’s more, the programs were
running, on average, 21 months behind schedule. And when they were completed,
they provided less than they promised.
The Defense Logistics Agency had no use for parts worth more than half of the
$13.7 billion in equipment stacked up in DOD warehouses in 2006 to 2008.
And these are only the tips of the military’s misspending iceberg. We really
don’t know how much the Pentagon wastes because, believe it or not, there hasn’t
been a complete audit of the Pentagon in more than 15 years.
In 1994, the Government Management Reform Act required the Inspector General
of each federal agency to audit and publish the financial statements of their
agency. The Department of Defense was the only agency that has been unable to
comply. In fiscal 1998 the Department of Defense used $1.7 trillion of
undocumentable adjustments to balance the books. In 2002 the situation was even
worse. CBS News reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted, “we cannot
track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”
Imagine that a school district were to reveal that it didn’t know where it
spent its money. Now imagine the Republican response. Perhaps, “Off with
their desktops!”
How did Congress’ respond to DOD’s delinquency? It gave it absolution and
allowed it to opt out of its legal requirement. But as a sop to outraged public
opinion Congress required DOD to set a date when it would have its book
sufficiently in order to be audited. Which the Pentagon dutiful did, and missed
every one of the target dates. The latest is 2017 and DOD has already announced
it will be unable to meet that deadline.
Adding insult to injury, last September, the GAO found that the new computer systems intended to improve the Pentagon’s financial oversight are themselves nearly 100 percent or $7 billion
over budget and as much as 12 years behind schedule!
The Pentagon is not just incompetent. It is corrupt. In November 2009 the
Pentagon’s Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the federal watchdog
responsible for auditing oversight of military contractors, raised the question of criminal wrongdoing when it found that the audits that did occur were riddled with serious breaches of auditor
independence. One Pentagon auditor admitted he did not perform detailed tests
because, “The contractor would not appreciate it.”
Why would the Pentagon allow its contractors to get away with fraud? To
answer that question we need to understand the incestuous relationship between
the Pentagon and its contractors that has been going on for years, and is
getting worse. From 2004 to 2008, 80 percent of retiring three and four star
officers went to work as consultants or defense industry executives.
Thirty-four out of 39 three- and four-star generals and admirals who
retired in 2007 are now working in defense industry roles — nearly 90 percent.
Generals are recruited for private sector jobs
well before they retire. Once employed by the military contractor the general
maintains a Pentagon advisory role.
“In almost any other realm it would seem a clear conflict of interest. But
this is the Pentagon where…such apparent conflicts are a routine fact of life”,
an in-depth investigation by the Boston Globe concluded.
U.S. military spending now exceeds the spending of all other countries combined. Knowledge
military experts argue that we can cut at least $1 trillion from the Pentagon
budget without changing its currently expressed mission. But a growing number
believe that the mission itself is suspect. Economic competitors like India and
China certainly approve of our willingness to undermine our economic
competitiveness by diverting trillions of dollars into war and weapons
production. Some argue that all this spending has made us more secure but all
the evidence points in the opposite direction. Certainly our $2 trillion and
counting military adventures in the Middle East and Afghanistan and Pakistan
have won us few friends and multiplied our enemies.
Defense experts Gordon Adams and Matthew Leatherman, writing in the Washington
Post offer another argument against unrestrained military spending.
“Countries feel threatened when rivals ramp up their defenses; this was true
in the Cold War, and now it may happen with China. It’s how arms races are born.
We spend more, inspiring competitors to do the same — thus inflating defense
budgets without making anyone safer. For example, Gates observed in May that no
other country has a single ship comparable to our 11 aircraft carriers. Based on
the perceived threat that this fleet poses, the Chinese are pursuing an
anti-ship ballistic missile program. U.S. military officials have decried this
“carrier-killer’‘ effort, and in response we are diversifying our capabilities
to strike China, including a new long-range bomber program, and modernizing our
carrier fleet at a cost of about $10 billion per ship.”
For tens of millions of Americans real security comes not from fighting wars
on foreign soil but from not having to worry losing their house or their job or
their medical care. As Joshua Holland, columnist for Alternet points out 46 states faced combined budget shortfalls this year of $130 billion, leading them to fire tens of thousands of workers and cut
off assistance to millions of families. Just the supplemental requests for
fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan this year were $170 billion.
What is perhaps most astonishing of all is that cutting the military budget
is wildly popular. Even back in 1995, when military spending was only a fraction
of its present size, a poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes
reported that 42 percent of the US public feeling that defense spending is too
high and a majority of Americans were convinced
that defense spending “has weakened the US economy and given some allies an
economic edge.”
This March Reuters released a new poll that found the majority of Americans support
reducing defense spending.
The next time you hear Republicans insist they want to ferret out government
waste and reduce spending and stamp out incompetence ask them why the one part
of government that exemplifies everything they say is wrong with government is
the one part of government they embrace most heartily.
David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and director of its New Rules Project.
You can follow David at defendingthepublicgood.org
