Remember when it was discovered that the U.S. military had been buying ordinary products for extraordinary sums? There were $37 screws, $7,622 coffee makers and, perhaps most memorably, $640 toilet seats.
These and similar scandals helped shed light on the culture of waste that had overtaken the Pentagon in the 1980s and ’90s. But a recent inspector general’s report makes in plain that wasteful spending by the DOD and its contractors is not a thing of the past.
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The Washington Examiner’s Kelly Cohen reported on Nov. 2 that the Pentagon blew nearly $43 million on a natural gas facility in Afghanistan when a similar station constructed in Pakistan cost just $500,000.
The station is located in Sheberghan, a natural gas-rich area near Afghanistan’s northern border with Turkmenistan. In a special report to Defense Secretary Ash Carter, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, wrote that the facility was originally estimated to cost just $3 million. But somehow the DOD’s Task Force for Stability and Business Operations spent $42.7 million on the project between 2011 and 2014, including $30 million for overhead costs.
Nobody at DOD seems to know if the facility is operational or what happened to the money. As Sopko wrote to Carter, “One of the most troubling aspects of this project is that the Department of Defense claims that it is unable to provide an explanation for the high cost of the project or to answer any other questions concerning its planning, implementation or outcome.”
The project’s purpose was to exhibit to Afghanis the commercial viability of natural gas, and to reduce Afghanistan’s reliance on imported petroleum products. But it looks like the project didn’t do those things, in part because converting an automobile to compressed natural gas costs about $700 in Afghanistan, a nation where the average annual income is only $690. The Task Force should have known this, but didn’t bother with a feasibility study.
This is a tale of mismanagement, incompetence, fraud and corruption. It’s also a reminder that the military, no matter how deservedly revered its members, is just one more part of the government. And like other government bureaucracies, it has a tendency to spend other people’s money with abandon. It is insensitive to the value of money draining out of citizen’s paychecks and bank accounts.
Only government could pay 80 times the market price to construct something, and even then to have no one involved able to remember the least detail about it. This should also serve as a reminder for those Republicans who are so eager to increase the military budget. In addition to wasting $40 million to fraud on this project, the military has been paying between $15 and $27 per gallon on biofuels, which is several times the cost of conventional fuels.
Lawmakers are calling for an investigation of the program’s finances. That’s a good start, but the Pentagon budget will not be reined in and spent on what is needed until the top brass and president understand that the use of the money must be prioritized. Republicans should not reward Pentagon waste with larger budgets, any more than they would reward IRS malingering with larger budgets.
They should instead serve the taxpayers who elected them, and demand the same kind of accountability they call for from other agencies that waste money.
