Defense Spending is Out of Control

This problem snowballed in the early 2000s when Congress directed the Pentagon to cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts. Apparently, it was decided that the defense contractors should be trusted to offer fair contracts to the defense department. Somehow that has led to a shoulder-fired stinger missile that cost $25,000 in 1991 now costing more than $400,000. The Pentagon recently said major contractors have “cash beyond their needs for operations or investment.” They have bilked us of billions and billions of dollars.

A former top negotiator Shay Assad showed 60 Minutes host Bill Whitaker an oil pressure switch that should cost $328, but which was actually more than $10,000. The 60 Minutes report found that the DOD would often negotiate contracts with profits of 12 to 15 percent built in, only for Pentagon analysts to find overcharges that raised total profits to 40 percent or more. 

When he was first in office Donald Trump tweeted ‘billions of dollars’ would be saved on military contracts. Within two years of him entering the White House Trump’s Pentagon fired the top official doing just that. Assad had already built a reputation as the Defense’s Department toughest contract negotiator but he was removed from his job, with his efforts to save and recover hundreds of millions of dollars ended. Trump administration officials remove Assad purportedly for having hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel costs. But the real reason was that he pushed a controversial plan to slow payments to defense contractors by tying contractor payments to their performance. Assad was reassigned to a job in Massachusetts that was unconnected to the contract negotiating team he had led for years. He had had a special arrangement that allowed him to live in the Boston area and commute regularly to Washington, this was allowed because Assad was viewed as unusually good at saving taxpayers’ money. The Defense Department spent slightly over $500,000 from 2012 to 2019 on Assad’s transport to Washington. The real irony is that the administration used travel expense as an excuse to reassign Assad when President Trump’s golf trips to courses in Florida, New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Scotland had cost taxpayers more than $100 million. I would also like to point out that Trump’s Golf Outings cost more than 250 times the presidential salary that he bragged about declining.

To make things even worse House and Senate appropriators have added into their two fiscal 2024 Defense spending bills a combined $25.7 billion the Pentagon did not seek for more than 1,200 research and procurement projects. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense the House passed an appropriations bill that would add $10.7 billion for 580 different programs while the Senate’s contains nearly $15 billion for a mostly different group of 636 weapons programs.Congressman from both sides of the aisle always do everything necessary to keep this cash cow healthy. They cry, China, China, China, to stoke your fears but the only real danger from China is China’s theft of America’s intellectual property and their economic war against us.