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IPFS News Link • Military Industrial Complex

Pentagon May Receive Over $600 Billion Despite Hiding Additional $125 Billion 'Waste'

• The Daily Bell

House Pushes Ahead with $611 Billion Defense Policy Bill … The Republican-led House is pushing ahead with a $611 billion defense policy bill that prohibits closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, forbids the Pentagon from trimming the number of military bases and awards U.S. troops their largest pay raise in six years. -Business Insider

The Pentagon is about to reap a generous windfall of revenue of up to $600 billion or more (see above) even though it cannot adequately account for up to $8 trillion and just recently was exposed for hiding some $125 billion of "bureaucratic waste.

A Washington Post investigation reveals this waste, which was internally documented in a study by the Pentagon. That study itself showed the funds that were improperly distributed.

Here, from the Post story:

The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.

Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

The report, issued in January 2015, identified "a clear path" for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

… Based on reams of personnel and cost data, their report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management.


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