The chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on Tuesday blasted the Pentagon over a published report saying the Defense Department commissioned and then buried a study that revealed $125 billion dollars in “administrative waste.”
The internal study by the Defense Business Board found that the Pentagon has almost as many people working desk jobs as it does active duty troops, according to the Washington Post. It also concluded the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion dollar budget on overhead and administration.
The report drew a sharp rebuke in a joint statement issued by Arizona Sen. John McCain and Texas Rep. Mac Thornberry, the chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.
“The Defense Business Board’s key findings — that the Department of Defense could save as much as $125 billion over five years by eliminating unnecessary back-office bureaucracy — are not a surprise. Nor are the problems identified by the board new,” the statement read.
“We have known for many years that the department’s business practices are archaic and wasteful, and its inability to pass a clean audit is a longstanding travesty. The reason these problems persist is simple: a failure of leadership and a lack of accountability,” it said.
Citing interviews and confidential memos, the Post report said Pentagon leaders ordered that the report buried because of fear Congress would use the findings to cut defense spending.
Those fears may have been well-grounded.
McCain and Thornberry outlined a number of actions taken by Congress that were a result of a lack of confidence in the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, including a mandated a 25 percent reduction to administrative support functions, a 25 percent reduction to bloated headquarters staffs, a 12 percent reduction to the number of general and flag officers and a 12 percent reduction to the number of senior executive service civilian employees.
“The reported restrictions imposed on key data relating to this study may have denied taxpayers the transparency they deserve,” the joint statement said.
The front-page Washington Post report on the Defense Business Board study was co-authored by legendary investigative reporter Bob Woodward and asserted: “After the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.”
But Pentagon officials strongly denied that the study was suppressed, insisting it was rolled out at a public meeting last year.
“The DBB study has been publicly available on defense.gov since its release in January 2015, where it has been downloaded more than 2,800 times. It received press coverage at the time of its release and the report was provided to Congress,” said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Gordon Trowbridge.
The Pentagon says Deputy Secretary Robert Work, who commissioned the report, and other DoD officials welcomed the outside input. They found the report to be “well-intentioned” but of “limited value” because it lacked “specific, actionable recommendations” and “failed to take into account many of DoD’s ongoing efficiency initiatives” in the same areas.
“Where the study did offer concrete recommendations, the department has taken action. For example, we have implemented service contract review boards that are projected to achieve billions of dollars in savings,” Trowbridge told the Examiner.
In response to the criticism from McCain and Thornberry, Trowbridge leveled some blame at Congress for blocking reforms that the Pentagon argues could save billions.
“Those include another round of base realignment and closure to allow us to right-size our basing structure for the first time since 2005, as well as adjustments to health care fees and incentives that havebeen frozen in some cases for even longer than that,” Trowbridge said.
