Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) is a legislator who has been intent on grappling with the thankless task of trying to audit the Pentagon. She introduced the Audit the Pentagon Act of 2012 and then introduced an updated version of that bill in January 2013. She included a press release from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which had the following language: "As the only federal agency not subject to an audit, the Pentagon has lost tens of billions of dollars to waste, fraud and abuse. It is past time to check the wasteful practices with little oversight that weakens our financial outlook and ultimately our national security."
"The Pentagon is the only agency that cannot be audited or predict realistically when it will do so. The Pentagon admits the problem and agrees it has a duty to pass an audit. The Pentagon's Office of the Comptroller wrote in 2008, 'Our financial problems are pervasive and well documented.' "
William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project of the Center for International Policy, has stated that "the Defense Department doesn't know how much equipment it has purchased, how much it has been overcharged, or how many contractors it employs." The Project on Government Oversight maintains that the Pentagon has spent about $6 billion thus far on "fixing" its audit problem. But it has done so, Hartung notes, "with no solution in sight."
The story of the F-35 jet fighter helps explain how not having a functional auditing system causes U.S. military spending to get out of hand. The initial estimate of the building program for the F-35 was $233 billion. Today, the price tag has more than quadrupled, with estimates ranging from $1.1 trillion to $1.4 trillion, making it the most expensive weapons system in human history. The pilots' helmets alone run to $400,000 a piece.
The F-35 is, of course, only one part of a spending and auditing problem that will only grow in the future. Lawrence S. Wittner, a professor at Albany (NY) University and a fellow board member of Peace Action, estimates that Donald Trump's plan for military spending will add about $90 billion to the annual Pentagon budget. Wittner, who writes extensively on military spending issues, calculates that the share of discretionary spending will increase from 54% in FY 2015 -- the National Priorities Project uses 55% for FY 2015 -- to 63% if military spending was increased to $690 billion in the next FY budget and other areas were cut to fund this increase.
Just to keep things in perspective, China's current military spending is about a third of what the U.S. spends and Russia spends about a ninth.
ADDENDUMS:
*The Death in Custody Reporting Act (DICRA) requires all law-enforcement agencies and medical examiners to fill out an 18-question report for any person who dies, no matter the cause, while interacting with the criminal justice system. The Department of Justice can withhold 10% of federal grant funds for any agency that does not comply.
*The Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) adopted a report recommending negotiations to start in 2017 on a legally-binding instrument to ban nuclear weapons. All African, Latin-American, Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Pacific states, along with some European countries, united behind the proposal. All nine nuclear-armed nations boycotted the OEWG.
*The nuclear waste accident at New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) contaminated 35% of the underground site. The cleanup could cost $2 billion, making it one of the most expensive nuclear accidents in history.
*A lawsuit filed in the Washington D.C. District Court by Grant Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, contends that U.S. aid to Israel is illegal under U.S. law, which prohibits aid to nuclear-armed nations that have not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty -- Israel is one of four countries that have not signed it. Israel has had nuclear weapons for decades. The lawsuit also contends that the aid violates two amendments to the 1961 Foreign Aid Act, known as the Symington and Glenn amendments, which ban aid to clandestine nuclear powers.
Since Congress passed the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act in 1975, the U.S. has given Israel about $234 billion in aid.
No comments:
Post a Comment