The U.S. spent nearly $500,000 on a building at an Afghan Special Police Training Center’s dry fire range that began to disintegrate just four months after it was completed, according to a Pentagon report.
The structure is one of 16 built by the U.S. in Afghanistan with severe deficiencies that “threatened the structural integrity of the buildings and the safety of the buildings’ occupants.”
In the case of the police training center, the structure was so bad that the Afghan government had to tear it down and rebuild it with its own money, the report said.
The findings come from a new Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report that also discovered only about half of all Defense Department construction projects in the country were completed at the time of their inspections, while more than a quarter experienced delays ranging from five months to more than two-and-a-half years.
John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, was expected to testify Wednesday morning about the report and other wasteful construction in the country at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform.
One-third of completed U.S. construction projects in Afghanistan have never even been used and others were substantially underused, like the Salang hospital in Parwan providence that as of January 2014 had only utilized about 35 percent of its square footage.
“The limited use — due primarily to the lack of electricity, water, furniture and equipment — had prevented them from providing optimal medical care. For example, because there was no clean water, hospital staff were washing newborns with untreated river water,” according to Sopko’s prepared testimony.
The report reviewed 44 construction projects, less than half of which met contract requirements and technical specifications. Despite these multiple problems, contractors were paid the full contract amount for their work.
The report didn’t provide a total amount of money wasted based on the deficiencies found in the buildings.
In another example, Sopko’s prepared testimony said a contractor put a concrete slab roof instead of a wood-trussed roof on a building in an area with high seismic activity, raising the potential for life-threatening safety concerns.
The last time Sopko testified before Congress earlier this year, he slammed the Pentagon for spending $800 million to build up the Afghan economy and infrastructure that yielded few if any successes.
The Pentagon’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations made news last year for wasting nearly $150 million housing its staff in plush Afghan villas and $43 million on a gas station in Afghanistan that should have only cost about $300,000.
The string of wasteful spending prompted lawmakers to question whether the Defense Department should be in the business of construction.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Sopko in January requesting a formal audit of the Defense Department’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, or TFBSO.
“I believe that the Defense Department must provide an accurate accounting of how all the money provided to the TFBSO was actually spent,” Grassley wrote in the letter. “I need assurance that all this money was spent in accordance with the law.”
In response to the request, SIGAR agreed to conduct two audits: one on finances and one on performance, Jill Gerber, a spokeswoman for Grassley, told the Washington Examiner.
Each audit will take between nine months and a year, so Gerber said she is expecting results after January.
