Monday, December 15, 2003
The Money Pit
From a recent episode of NOW with Bill Moyers on PBS, Bill interviews retired Pentagon officer Chuck Spinney:
MOYERS: Are we getting the best weapons at the lowest prices?
SPINNEY: No. No way at all. We could get… The weapons we're buying, we could get at lower prices if we held the contractors' feet to the fire. And I submit that many of the weapons we're getting, the best that you can say about them is that they are not designed for the threats that we face. Some of them may not work at all.
MOYERS: Spinney should know. His job at the Pentagon for the last three decades: to analyze the cost and effectiveness of America's weapons. And he says, national security is at risk because the country's not getting what we're paying for.
SPINNEY: I think it's out of control. I think a lot of people have just thrown up their hands.
MOYERS: So out of control, says Spinney, that the Pentagon can't account for billions upon billions of the dollars it's spending while its financial books border on pure fiction.
SPINNEY: We have an accounting system that is unauditable. Every year, they do an audit and the inspector general would issue a report saying we have to wave the audit requirements, issue a disclaimer of opinion because we can't balance the books. We can't tell you how the money got spent.
MOYERS: Case in point: since 1995, the General Accounting Office has ranked the Defense Department's financial management among the worst in the federal government "… on [the] GAO's list of high-risk areas vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement."
What's more, in fiscal year 2000, the Defense Department's own inspector general found that the Pentagon could not account for more than $1 trillion — trillion with a "t."
There's more and it gets much deeper.
posted by chris at 10:23 AM
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