WASHINGTON DC (March 18, 2019) —
The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit
By Matt Taibbi
Sunday, March 17, 2019
"Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.
…
"For instance, part of what inspired original investigations into defense finances were infamous stories in the 1980s and early Nineties about the military charging $640 for toilet seats, $436 for hammers, etc. A chief crusader was a young Iowa Sen Chuck Grassley, who was so determined to hear such tales from famed military whistle-blower Franklin C “Chuck” Spinney — one of the first military analysts to go public with accusations of waste and procurement fraud — that early in 1983 Grassley drove to the Pentagon in an orange Chevette to see him.
"The DoD refused to let Grassley see Spinney. Grassley got him to testify on the Hill six weeks later.
“'The following Monday, his photo was on the cover of Time magazine,' Grassley recalls. The March 1983 cover asked, are billions being wasted?
"It seemed like a breakthrough. Spinney’s tales of waste became symbols that aroused the imagination of both the left and the right, who each saw in them their own vision of government run amok.
"But 35 years later, Chuck Grassley, now 85, is still sending letters to the Pentagon about overpriced parts, only this time with more zeros added. The Iowan last year asked why we were spending more than $10,000 apiece for 3D printed airborne toilet-seat covers, or $56,000 on 25 reheatable drinking cups at a brisk $1,280 each (apparently an upgrade to earlier iterations of $693 coffee cups, whose handles broke too easily). The DoD has since claimed to have fixed these problems.
"Asked if he was frustrated that it’s the same stories decades later, Grassley says, “Absolutely.” He pauses. “And a long time after I leave the Senate, it’ll likely still be the same problem.”
"Three decades into the effort to pry open the Pentagon’s books, it’s not clear if we’ve been going somewhere, or we’ve just been spending billions to get nowhere, in one of the most expensive jokes any nation has played on itself. “When everything’s always a mystery,” says Grassley, 'nothing ever has to be solved.'”
