President-elect Trump referred frequently during the election campaign to waste, fraud and abuse, and his intention to end them. Many campaigning politicians say the same thing, but somehow these things continue.
They offer Trump an immediate opportunity to start working on his legacy. The president who eliminates needlessly lost taxpayer money will deserve the public’s gratitude, and is likely to earn its votes again.
The president-elect might start by looking at a Washington Post story Monday that focused on savings that could be made at the Pentagon. Republicans and Democrats, elected officials and unelected bureaucrats, have long resisted change here, but a president unbound by convention could take it on. President Obama is leaving behind a plan he lacked the will and stamina to implement. All Trump has to do is pick it up and run with it.
The Department of Defense has tried to bury a January 2015 study of its own bureaucracy. This found relatively painless ways to save $125 billion over five years without compromising the nation’s military might or even furloughing or laying off staff. That colossal sum is almost exactly what the military stands to lose over the next four years under sequestration.
As the Washington Examiner reported extensively in its magazine Monday, there are grave fears among the military’s top brass and on Capitol Hill that sequestration is undermining American military readiness and morale, because it is draining money away from personnel and training. Yet here is a huge sum, $25 billion a year, being sluiced away. It could and should be diverted to those areas where the military is being starved.
The plan would achieve these savings through workforce attrition, early retirements of some civilian personnel, proper information technology management and the renegotiation of certain unreasonably expensive service contracts.
No one at the Pentagon had previously done any sort of rigorous analysis of how badly the military budget was being spent. It is the only agency in the federal government never to comply with a 1990 law that requires a complete audit of operations.
After the report had been approved by the Defense Business Board, the Pentagon pulled it off the Internet and suppressed it. The top brass imposed secrecy restrictions on the data, “which ensured no one could replicate the [study’s] findings.”
Pentagon officialdom might seem different from that of other government departments and agencies, but it isn’t — it’s just a much larger and better-armed wing of the same bureaucracy. And like every other agency, it tries to give the impression that every dime it receives is essential.
The decision to suppress this study is telling about the way Washington works. If you’re making the case that military readiness is suffering and military families are living in hardship, it doesn’t help your case if you’re also wasting billions of dollars. But, while the suppression of the report is understandable, it isn’t acceptable. Money must not be wasted when the organization wasting it is short of funds for urgent necessities. The two naturally go together. After all, a penny saved is a penny earned.
The military clearly needs more money for many of its needs. But the Pentagon must also be held to account and stop wasting. It is massive, secretive and widely supported by the public in its mission.
Republicans in Congress have been disappointingly hesitant to hold its leaders accountable for their budget. And although some liberals do rail against waste, many Democratic lawmakers are either fearful of appearing to be anti-military or else worried they will lose bases or other installations in their districts.
This presents Trump, who wants to build the military substantially, with a challenge and an opportunity. He is no respecter of Washington’s conventions and taboos. So, as he pursues his plan to make the U.S. military great again, we hope he defies the bureaucracy and begins the process of studying and putting this report’s recommendations into effect.
