Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Military Contracts - billions of tax payer dollars wasted each year

Most of you have read a lot about government waste, but how about examples of military waste? I own a small electrical design & sell business near DC. I spent most of my career working for GE & Westinghouse involved with government/military contracts. I have seen first hand how vast amounts of taxpayers money have been thrown away over the past 40 years. I supplied high voltage equipment for a Navy project in DC. During the drawing approval stage we submitted numerous times with huge amounts of unnecessary supporting documents. As is typically the case the electrical specifications were incorrect. This happens most of the time. After all this documentation the Navy suddenly realizes the contract completion date is nearing & equipment is urgently needed. They approve drawings that were submitted many months before & then realize the equipment can't be built in time. Since its not the Navy's money(it's ours)they spend a substantial amount for overtime (how about 100%) & even special dedicated trucks at $2500 each to delivery the various equipment. Anyone that thinks this is an isolated example is kidding them selves. Imagine the vast multi-millions & billions the military contracts for defense weapons & facilities. The entire process is a cluster screw. The military & government hasn't a clue how to specify or manage any contract. I would believe that about 50% of our expenditures for military hardware & facilities is totally wasted. Contracts are improperly written, politically awarded in many cases, improperly managed, & no body really cares. If millions are wasted those involved still draw their salaries & continue down the same path wasting tax payer money year after year. Factor in entitlements, Foreign Aid, waste in SS & welfare & you have the answers to our budget short fall.

If you know it is wrong and you wait til the last minute to speak up, Why? you milking the system too for more money?

Enter a huge "Cluster" the F-35 !!!

There sure is, the contractors are doing rather well by it. But i'll say a positive note for your old employer GE. They sure do make a good turbine engine (700/701 series), better then the darn Lycomings.

Yep. The F35 is a very expensive white elephant. It's being tested down the street from where I type this. I know what the people who actually have to work on it say about it.

I have an aunt and uncle that ran a small machine shop with 4 machinests in Washington state for many years. The majority of their business was government contracts(mostly Federal). Most of the items they built were already available on the market but the government had to have everything built to their exact specifications. These were all bid contracts and my aunt and uncle were fairly competitive because of their low overhead. A few years ago the US started letting China bid on these contracts. This put my aunt and uncle out of business in no time. It wasn't a hardship for them because they were ready to retire but it was a hardship for the 4 machinests and their families.

tbear, yer screwin with my livelihood.

You must be an idiot. I'm a small businessman & have no ability to change anything that the Navy or government does or doesn't do. No, I lost my a$$ on this order with all the changes, resubmittals, engineering time, calls to manufacturers, & on & on. My point is that this happens time & time again & no one in the military is accountable. We as tax payers pay for all the mismanagement. The media discusses entitlements & other wasteful programs, but little is every said about military contract waste. Your statement makes me want to puke.

There are a lot of defense contracts that are known wastes of money; performance and budget are poor. Lower level military officers (AF/Army Colonels & Navy Captains who actually run the programs admit it. I have recommended cancelling several (only the Contracting Officer can legally cancel a contract) and feel that my recommendations have saved money; but then, it gets wasted elsewhere. These were in the order of about $100-125 million each, not big, but significant just the same.

The higher level officers are more career conscious than the lower level officers and rarely admit that it is time to pull the plug.

The problem is that each new project or technology appears to offer great benefits at first and then following contract award, the successful bidder starts finding issues that they told the Technical Evaluation panel were negligible or presented no major hurdle. Recall that in 1990 Defense Secretary Richard Cheney ordered the A-12 aircraft cancelled; years of litigation followed.

It is just a system of greedy contractors milking the system

It does not work that way. Speak up and your contract may get terminated (not too many contracts these days) or your COTR (contracting Officer's Technical Representative) will chew you out. In an ideal world, you might be right, but in the real world, it just does not work that way.

In a free enterprise society, anyone can bid on a job. Under the Buy America act, there must be 10% lower price if the product is made overseas. If you are too high, you lose. If you support free enterprise, that�s the law.

"War" itself is the biggest economic scam in the history of the world.

How Cheney is still free of the gallows I'll never understand.

Everything I'm involved with in the DC area requires American made products. Granted many subcomponents are made in foreign markets, but the electrical products have to be made in the US, Canada, or Mexico. There are exceptions of course. A few years ago the Navy issued a bid for VFDs for shipboard use that had to be 100% made in America. After lots of rebidding with no US manufacturer able to comply the requirement was dropped. Many of our electrical manufacturing plants are now owned by foreign corporations. Square D, Siemens, & ABB come to mind. I represent one of the largest high voltage transformer manufacturers in the world with a huge plant in Missouri that employees union workers. Profits go to Belgium. One of my old employers (GE) now makes transformers in Mexico. If a major war developed I'm not sure our domestic electrical industry could serve our needs. As my post stated the military waste so much tax payer money we should require everything used to be made 100% in America. Probably not possible, but it would be nice to grow our manufacturing base again.

+1,000 bear

Been involved in this for years both in the Navy and as a contractor. What you say is generally true. But, I've found that to be the case govt wide. There are agencies much worse than DOD. It's what happens in any organization when individuals don't have any skin in the game.

There may be more inefficient agencies, but none with an annual ~ $680B budget, add discretionary spending and it's not even close.

The Pentagon can't account for $2.3 Trillion(yes that's Trillion) and the military can't account for 25% of it's own spending.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kpWqdPMjmo



More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.

"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml

Pick on the uniforms with "great sources" like U tube and CBS news. Bottom line is uniformed officers have very little to say about spending. They set requirements and assess then it's in the hands of the politicans. I've written ad-nauseam here about procurement and how the Congress and mostly the civilian leadership drive that train. Make it worse today where the leadership both uniformed and civilial try to run an organization that is essentially wasteful by nature like a business, pad the budget with non-military expenditures and add contractors replacing jobs formerly done by uniformed personnel and you have the waste.

Do you think the video of Rumsfield saying the Pentagon can't account for $2.3 Trillion would be somehow different from another source?

Our company is often involved in bidding government purchases. As stated, the process is ridiculous.

We went after a large procurement just a few miles from our offices. It was a big contract, and we pulled in some outside talent because the project was bigger than we could do alone. Just adding up the manpower and resources spent on the bid, I figured the total cost for our company to respond was about $250,000. And we were told after the fact that we had the best proposal.

But the bid went to another company. The bid was a small business set-aside, and the company that won isn't/wasn't a small business. Their consultant bluntly told my partner that it did not matter what was in our bid, he golfed the contract to his client.

So about 5-6 companies put in an effort similar to ours, spending probably a total of over $1,000,000 in proposals.

In the end, the company that got the contract nearly went broke because they staffed up, but the government only issued about 1% of the indicated Task Orders against the contract.

Now everyone involved has to charge more on their next venture, to make up for what they lost on that one.

And that, folks, is how you get $600 hammers. That's what our US Federal Acquisition Rules force. It's the cost of bidding and compliance with the regulatory overhead that runs up the cost. If they'd come in the front door, pick from the commercial off the shelf offerings, and pay net 30, they'd pay the same for a hammer as anyone else.