Pentagon Study Shows $125 Billion In Waste That Can Be Cut . . . Pentagon Promptly Buries Study

On this blog, we have often discussed and lamented how billions are wasted in the government, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, without the slightest accountability of officials or serious reforms. The problem is especially prominent in the military. Now, the Washington Post has acquired an internal study that found $125 billion in waste from bloated staff to needless redundancies. The response of the Defense Department in the Obama Administration was swift and firm . . . it buried the report so neither Congress nor the media would see it. It is good to see that our bureaucrats can still move aggressively when called to action.

The study by the Defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel of corporate executives, and consultants from McKinsey and Company only looked at the back-office bureaucracy rather than weapons problems with an eye to make it more efficient. The report, issued in January 2015,found $125 billion ion savings over five years that would not require any layoffs or reductions. Rather it could reach these goals through attrition and early retirements as well as modernization of systems.

The study found 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. The back-office staff included 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel. So the Pentagon has a back staff of over 1 million people supporting an active force of 1.3 million. Not exactly an efficient ratio.

Here is the article: The Washington Post