WASHINGTON – Sen. Chuck Grassley is urging Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to review which employees were responsible for wasting at least $64.8 million on a plane intended for counter-narcotics work in Afghanistan that never flew a single such mission and now is to be sold at auction. Grassley called the plane a “hangar queen” and a prime example of the kind of wasteful spending Mattis sought to stop in a strongly worded July memorandum to Department of Defense employees.
“As DoD officials are passing the buck, the American taxpayers are left holding the bag yet again,” Grassley wrote to Mattis. “In line with your call to ‘take aggressive steps to end waste in the department,’ I ask that a DoD review be conducted to determine who is responsible for what happened. Once that determination is made, there should be an appropriate measure of accountability, including potential disciplinary action. The management and funding of the counter-narcotics plane should be used as a prime example of the need to head off this waste.”
Grassley added a handwritten note reading: “Common sense dictates that if an admiral can be fired or the captain of a vessel can be dismissed because their ship rams another (if that action is taken because of dereliction of duty), then these people connected with this failed plane need to be fired. If heads don’t roll, nothing changes. Thanks for your consideration.”
Grassley was referring to senior leaders of the U.S. Navy who were fired over two ship collisions in the Pacific over the summer that resulted in the deaths of 17 sailors.
In July, Grassley and Mattis each reacted with concern to a report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction that the Pentagon wasted as much as $28 million on camouflage uniforms inappropriate for the Afghan landscape. Grassley called the expense “embarrassing and an affront to U.S. taxpayers.” Mattis wrote in his memo: “Cavalier or casually acquiescent decisions to spend taxpayer dollars in an ineffective and wasteful manner are not to recur.”
Grassley’s letter to Mattis is available here.
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