The Pentagon spent $43 million on a gas station in Afghanistan that should have cost $300,000, according to a new report from a government watchdog.
“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,” Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Ash Carter accompanying the special inspector general report released Monday.
The compressed natural gas station, built in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, was originally contracted to cost $3 million, according to the report. The project, known as the Downstream Gas Utilization, was part of the Task Force for Stability and Business Operations and was meant to show Afghanis the commercial viability of natural gas and reduce the country’s reliance on energy imports.
However, between 2011-14, the task force spent $42.7 million on the project, and $30 million went toward overhead costs, according to the report.
A similar natural gas station built in Pakistan cost $500,000, SIGAR found, which would equal roughly $306,000 at the current exchange rate. But because the task force ended in March, the Pentagon told SIGAR that it was unable to answer why the cost of the station ballooned so much.
“It’s an outrageous waste of money that raises suspicions that there is something more there than just stupidity,” Sopko told NBC News. “There may be fraud. There may be corruption. But I cannot currently find out more about this because of the lack of cooperation.”
The Pentagon did not dispute any findings in the report, according to the comments page of the report. However, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Brian P. McKeon did say in a letter responding to the findings attached to the report that SIGAR did not take up his office’s offer of help to find the personnel or documentation who might have information on the high cost.
The SIGAR report disputed McKeon’s claim.
Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, who is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote a critical letter Monday to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.
“There are few things in this job that literally make my jaw drop,” McCaskill said in a press release announcing the letter. “But of all the examples of wasteful projects in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Pentagon began prior to our wartime contracting reforms, this genuinely shocked me. It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous waste of money than building an alternative fuel station in a war-torn country that costs 8,000 percent more than it should and is too dangerous for a watchdog to verify whether it is even operational.”
McCaskill, who asked the Pentagon for answers in another SIGAR investigation of a project gone awry in Afghanistan, again requested information from Carter by Nov. 23, such as the names of anyone at the Pentagon who supervised the now defunct task force.
