by Duane N. Burghard
©2015
In case you haven't heard (and let's face it, if you've been paying attention to conservative media, you absolutely have NOT heard), early results are in and, so far, it appears pretty clear that the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is working. Back in June of 2015, The Atlantic magazine reported that, officially, some 16.4 MILLION additional Americans are now covered by some kind of healthcare. That number represents a drop in the uninsured of over 35 percent, which is the best improvement in over 40 years. And what groups are the biggest winners? Well, again, according to the official numbers, minorities and young people posted the biggest and best gains.
And yet it would be something of a massive understatement to say that the Affordable Care Act is a rousing success with the public. As of a year ago (the last spot I could find poll results that I thought were truly non-partisan), only 37% of those polled said they completely approved of the law (although, perhaps more interestingly, the same poll revealed that a staggering 75% of those who were newly insured did). And then of course, there's our "do nothing" House of Representatives which, despite its staggering inability to address basically ANY problem facing our Republic today, has found the time to vote to repeal the ACA over fifty times now.
And this brings me neatly around to my point today, which I suppose you could describe as a PROW (Political Rant Of the Week, for those who don't regularly read this blog), but I don't see it as a rant as much as a ... well, a point of confusion on my part. In a sentence, I truly do NOT understand the ridiculous, vitriolic, completely over the top and most importantly irrational hatred that most Republicans express when it comes to the ACA. After all, IT WAS THEIR PLAN!
Yes, that's right. I'm sorry to shock some of my more conservative friends who don't know this, but the Affordable Care Act was, in actual point of fact, originally, a REPUBLICAN based and sponsored health care plan. The "birth" of the ACA actually took place at a Conservative Think Tank organization called the Cato Institute back in the late 1980s (you may also find articles listing another Conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, as another "founder" if you will of the basic outline of the ACA, although that was in the early 1990s). In fact, at one point (1993), a bill that looks a LOT like the Affordable Care Act (and the similarities are anything but accidental) was introduced in the Senate by a Republican and had the support of a majority of Republicans in that body. Now, it may be hard for some of my readers to understand how such a thing could start from such a Republican based, but also frankly bipartisan beginning, and yet end up with the name "Obamacare" and then be labeled things like "socialism" and "the root of all evil in the universe." Believe me when I tell you that it's a pretty big mystery for the rest of us too (although the label of "socialism" is the one that drives me particularly crazy as the use of that term to describe the ACA is probably the most ridiculous misnomer in the history of American politics (and THAT is saying something!) and only serves to demonstrate the pure and unadulterated idiocy and ignorance of the person so describing it. But that said, once President Obama chose it as the "compromise of least resistance" and the idea most likely to get the votes to pass, well, evil it became and evil it was to everyone whose lives are so sadly laser focused on opposing everything the President does (usually if not always for no reason at all, other than the sake of opposing him).
But again, here we are, in late 2015, and every day there is more and more evidence that the ACA is doing what it's supposed to do ... AND it's saving us money (collectively, though not always individually) ... IF you compare it to the costs of the same level of care for the same number of people if we didn't have the ACA. If you think about it, this should make sense since the focus of the program was to add millions to the pool of insured persons which, by definition, allows insurance companies to develop ever better and more accurate premium models (which does, in fact, drive total, aggregate costs downward ... it is what the insurance industry calls the "law of large numbers" in action).
Overall, of course, the total costs have gone up, but that's exclusively because the number of people covered and the aggregate coverage provided have both gone up substantially, however, the two curves are absolutely not congruent.
At this point you'd be forgiven for thinking that I'm a big fan of the ACA, but if you think that, you'd actually be wrong. While there's no question that decreasing the number of uninsured persons in our society is a good thing (and it does in fact have a positive effect on controlling some costs within our health care system, and it also brings us closer to what other western democracies have done, though they are still doing it far better and more efficiently than we are), the ACA fundamentally fails to address the elephant in the room: the exploding costs of healthcare and drugs in America. Of course, the ACA was never intended to do that.
The ACA was intended, again, by its originally Republican authors, to allow for insurance and drug companies to continue to make radically higher profits (hence the creation of an insurance exchange with private insurance companies ... a major reason why the description of the ACA as socialism is just one of the dumbest things I've ever heard). The lack of ability to control costs is actually the source of the greatest amount of Democratic Party frustration with the ACA. Most Democrats would have preferred (and most still would prefer) something a lot closer to a "single payer" solution which would allow for the costs to be far more controlled. Essentially, what Obama has accomplished (and frankly, I should more accurately say, once again what Obama has accomplished) is more of what the Republicans wanted than the Democrats ... and for this they crucify him daily.
So, despite their success (and their refusal to even acknowledge their success), the Republicans continue to lambast the ACA daily. This constant and ongoing opposition is very confusing to me because, as time goes on, the empirical successes of the program (and the number of people positively affected by it) will continue to increase. A FAR better strategy, in my opinion, would be for the Republicans to (correctly) remind everyone that the ACA was in fact THEIR idea in the first place. If they're concerned about the need for some political cover in making such an about face, they could pass some meaningless amendment to it and declare it "fixed now" (though I seriously doubt this is necessary ... they've cultivated followers who are so extreme and obedient that, within 24 hours of the change of position, I would expect Fox News et al to be extolling the virtues of the great Republican success that is the Affordable Care Act and how Obama almost ruined what is clearly a great American success story etc.). In any case, it would seem to make much more sense to me to simply declare victory and move on.
But regardless of what happens with the Republicans and their position on the ACA as we move forward, the elephant in the room (or the other elephant I suppose), the costs issue, will remain, and there appears to be precisely ZERO political will to deal with that problem right now. Interestingly enough, Secretary Clinton spoke out this week specifically about controlling drug costs. Unfortunately, I view almost all promises and proposals made by Presidential candidates rather cynically (I find them largely ridiculous because they often involve things that the President has basically NO control over ... which makes the campaign promise meaningless beyond the grandstanding points earned with followers and potential followers who lack the basic civics education needed to know that). It seems more likely that Clinton was making her point to capitalize on the anger and frustration regarding the young billionaire who bought an AIDS drug and jacked the price from $13.50/dose to over $750/dose (which is, no question, outrageous ... but the young man has since spent the week becoming one of the most hated people in America, has promised to lower the price substantially, and is now under Federal investigation for fraud and lots of other fun charges ... karma, it seems, was actually awake and paying attention this week). Still, I applaud ANY efforts to control these costs because the ACA isn't going away any time soon ... and my point is that, whether you like it or not, if you're looking for the party to credit or blame for that fact ... well, it's probably NOT the party you thought it was.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Monday, September 14, 2015
PROW: Pentagon Critics Are Shooting At The Wrong Target
by Duane N. Burghard
©2015
OK, I need to stop writing about politics soon and get back to science and/or science fiction, because this crap is depressing!
That said, I need to give you at least one more rant from my position as radical centrist. This week, it's my friends on my far left that are driving me nuts. A number of people on social media this morning have rediscovered an article from early June of this year. The article makes a fairly incredible and frightening claim about our nation's military spending. The headline reads, "Report Reveals $8.5 Trillion Missing From Pentagon Budget." Now that's a headline that will get the attention of just about ALL of my "long haired, sandal wearing hippie" friends (and be clear, I have a LOT of them). Unfortunately, despite being very intelligent about a number of things, many of these friends let headlines like this trip what I call the "stupid switch" in their heads. Now, before my conservative friends start laughing, we ALL have stupid switches (and don't start throwing stones conservative friends, because, especially now, you guys live in houses with a LOT of glass). A person's stupid switch is what causes them to say, do or think something because someone else says or does something that fundamentally aligns with a (usually less than totally rational) bias in their head. So when you're fundamentally inclined to be opposed to military spending because you feel your nation's spending priorities are out of whack and because you've been exposed to some legitimate, specific examples of waste, fraud and abuse in defense contracts in the past, and you marry that inclination with a bombastic headline, well, stand back, because the ocean of self-righteous indignation can't be far behind (and again, conservative friends, I encourage you to hold your tongues, because your people have elevated self-righteous indignation to a freaking art form). Unfortunately, I'm easily distracted from the crap I'm supposed to be doing today, so when I saw this headline, article, and the corresponding hullabaloo, I felt the need to comment.
So let me start by noting that, when we're talking about money in government budgets, there's a BIG difference between "missing" (aka unaccounted for) and flat out wasted or stolen (although wasted is a frankly subjective term, so let's stick with what an auditor would define as fraud or theft). With respect to the specific claim in the articles, first, the total dollar figure spans a TWENTY YEAR period. Now, that's still an average of just over $400 BILLION per year, so we're still talking about a LOT of money, but remember, the headline writers want you to be outraged and angry in the streets, ready to fight with your friends. We can't have people walking around calmly saying, "hey, let's have a calm and rational discussion about this potentially disturbing issue," I mean, who would tune in for that? But let's get back to the issue here of the galactically large difference between missing/unaccounted for and stolen/fraud.
A deeper look into this issue quickly reveals that the overwhelming bulk of the money involved here is NOT, in actual point of fact, an example of theft, waste, fraud or abuse (SOME of it very well COULD be, but we don't KNOW that). No, what we're talking about is that there are trillions of dollars worth of government defense contracts that are simply unaudited. That does NOT automatically mean malfeasance or fraud, it means they don't know what happened to the money. I have no doubt that, in and among all of that money, there's probably a good deal of government waste to be found, but the article's title and implication are both VERY misleading in that the reader is meant to instantly conclude that ALL of the money involved MUST have been wasted.
With that having been said, I absolutely do agree that this is a pretty big problem, and pointing the finger of blame for it is pretty easy. You see, the problem began (in my view, very un-coincidentally) with the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s. Upon taking control of Congress, the Republicans actively took actions (mostly in terms of funding and resources) to discourage the normal level of auditing to take place. As a former military officer, I feel very comfortable saying that this failure to adequately care about, fund, monitor and follow up on the audit processes at the Pentagon was one that frustrated, irritated and just plain pissed off the people inside the Pentagon as much or more than anyone else (they don't like it when contracts don't get audited either and they absolutely DO want to know where the money is going). And it wouldn't take long at all for this backlog of audits problem to balloon completely out of control.
Many of you reading this are probably also relatively unfamiliar with the frankly inconceivable size and scope of what's involved in a military audit. To help you out, allow me to first familiarize you with the military's general rule regarding paperwork: if it moves, make a copy of it, if it doesn't move, make copies of it until it does. Second, let me tell you a brief story about my lone experience with an audit at the Pentagon.
In the early 1990s I was a Department Head at a Navy shore command in Rhode Island. As part of my job, I was in charge of the deck, admin and supply divisions (which is to say that I had fiduciary responsibilities). I was also the Command's Legal Officer. During my time there, another officer filed a formal discrimination complaint against my Commanding Officer. Not long after this, the command's Executive Officer (XO) called me into his office to direct me to assist in the command's defense regarding the officer's allegations. Part of that defense required me to audit a small contract, which immediately looked fishy to me (because the signature on one of the documents wasn't an officer whose name I recognized, and it wasn't a senior officer associated with our command, and it normally should have been). I noted my confusion to the XO. He was grateful that I cared more than he did, happy to assign me to do all the work, and promptly returned to the 12 inch tall stack of junk in his inbox.
I crossed the street to our base's command office and took the odd document in question to the Base Commander's secretary (who, of course, I knew). I asked her about the officer whose name appeared on the document. She assured me that the officer did not exist. I then made the mistake of asking if she was sure. She looked at me with relatively forgiving and only slightly condescending eyes and said, "Lieutenant, I have been in this job for over 20 years, I absolutely guarantee you that, not only is there no Captain by that name attached to any part of this base right now, but there has, in fact, never been a Captain by that name attached to this base in the entire time I have worked here." I lowered my head apologetically and retreated.
Fortunately for me, the Navy has this wonderful tool called the Blue Book. In the Blue Book is the name of every officer who has ever served in the history of the United States Navy. Surely, I thought, I will find this missing officer in the Blue Book and then be a lot closer to finding out why he was involved in the first place, etc.
He wasn't there.
Not only was there not an officer by that name in the Navy at that time, but, in the entire history of the United States Navy, there had NEVER been an officer with the name typed and signed on these orders. Well NOW I had a mystery.
Fortunately, this is the United States Military ... and like the X-Files, the truth is almost always "out there" ... somewhere, you just have to be willing to suffer to get it ... and when I say suffer, I mean paperwork.
The military loves paperwork more than pretty much any other entity on Earth, and a side effect of that affection is that there is almost never a piece of paper in the military that isn't attached, in some way, to lots of other pieces of paper. In this case, the contract I was dealing with included a set of orders, and they in turn were connected to actual payments on the contract. Unfortunately, the events involved were so long ago, that the only copies of relevant documents remaining were in the Pentagon archives. I returned to my XO and told him that the command needed to pay my way down to D.C. so that I could track down the documents in question. I was on the highway to D.C. only a few hours later.
I had never been to the Pentagon archives. In fact, to be honest, I hadn't known that the Pentagon archives existed (probably should have, but I didn't). I drove up to a very nondescript, three story tall, long, thin building in the D.C. area. I was frankly unimpressed with the building and its size, but I was also relieved because, in looking at the building I thought, "how hard can it be to find the right documents here?" I walked in the door, showed my orders to the guard, and was eventually told to go to the elevator, go to level B and wait for assistance. I did as I was instructed, but I was completely unprepared for what happened next.
Level B was several floors below ground (and I'm guessing from the time in the elevator it was at least 4 floors down). When the elevator doors opened, I walked out and my eyes went as wide as possible. I was inside a space that was several football fields large. Directly in front of me, on the well polished tile floor, were painted driving lanes (a mini version of what you'd see on the street). Within seconds an electric golf cart pulled up and a young man said, "Lt. Burghard?" I showed him what I was looking for. He studied the document for a moment and said, "OK, hop in."
We drove for several minutes through the "roads" in this incredibly cavernous space, past endless rows of shelves that were filled, from floor to ceiling, with folders and papers. The size and scope of the space was simply beyond my imagination. Finally, we arrived. My escort parked his golf cart and said, "we have to walk from here." Eventually we found the file on the contract that my documents referenced. The contract however, was for a pest control seminar involving personnel for a command that was nearly 200 miles away from ours. And then, there it was. Attached to the Pentagon records, there were references to TWO checks. One at the correct command, and one at our base.
Since you're probably interested in what happened at this point, before I go back to my main point let me quickly tell you what happened. Upon making this discovery, I immediately knew that we were dealing with an instance of fraud against the United States Government, which meant that I was about to be acting beyond the scope of my authority. So I contacted NIS (the Naval Investigative Service). An agent met with me two days later. I gave him the results of my audit, he thanked me and went away. A few weeks later he returned to my office with security pictures from a local bank and asked me if I could identify the individuals in the picture (the agent had tracked the second check to this bank at this date and time). I recognized the young man (fortunately NOT one of my people, in fact not even attached to my command), and, behind him in the corner, the officer who had filed the complaint against our Commanding Officer. Both men left the building that day in handcuffs. Both men went to prison.
Now, here's why I told you that story.
Think about the size and scope of what it took for little old me to do a simple audit on a small contract ... and now consider the task of auditing trillions of dollars of contracts dating back twenty years. Even if we had the political will (and we don't), the sheer size and scope of the auditing job to be done at this point is beyond what is possible. There aren't enough people or enough hours in the day. You'd have to recall THOUSANDS of people to active duty (and very specific people, people like me, officers with auditing experience) and you'd need to create a literal army of auditors. That alone is NEVER going to happen for dozens of reasons, but even if you somehow could, then you'd have to have some kind of organized and methodical approach to the audits, then you'd have to give the auditors authority to interrupt the current work of hundreds of thousands of troops and contractors and employees (which would be insanely costly to them) and, most importantly, you'd have to have hyper-specific guidelines regarding what constitutes waste, fraud and abuse ... AND, then you'd need a MASSIVE army of lawyers to follow up on the results of those audits ... and remember that, to be cost effective, each of those prosecutions has to make the government more money than all of the above costed (which is INCREDIBLY unlikely).
My point here is that it is incredibly hard for the Department of Defense to keep up with its existing audit responsibilities under ideal conditions, much less under conditions when the resources and manpower needed for the task are being squeezed out of existence. I should also note that I have serious doubts that the Department of Defense is somehow unique in having this problem. My guess is that a specific, intentional effort to reduce the frequency and efficacy of government audits is a government wide issue and that, yes, the blame, if any, for this fact belongs more with Congressional Republicans than any other group.
Since I can hear the stupid switches of my left leaning friends suddenly tripping again, and since I feel the need to try to say something positive about how to "fix" this gigantic problem, let me see if I can address the best way to do that. Basically, right now, it's impossible. Not only do you not have the necessary political will, but you have a party in power that has no interest in solving the problem. And removing them is not going to happen overnight (this leads to a somewhat separate rant about gerrymandering that will have to wait for another day). To "fix" the problem, you need to replace the Representatives causing it. Given how gerrymandered their districts are, you are VERY unlikely to do that by simply trying to run good candidates against them in a majority of those districts. That plan simply won't work (and we know this because it consistently hasn't). You have to travel farther down the food chain, specifically, to the STATE legislatures. Control of the state legislature, in most cases, gives your party control of the redistricting process which, after the next census, in theory, gives you your first rational chance at shifting the balance of power. Sadly, for my left leaning friends, this is spectacularly unlikely. Why? Because, if you haven't noticed from their Facebook feeds, NONE of them are getting all excited and frothy about their state rep candidates. In fact, most of them don't even VOTE for their state rep candidates (for far too many Democrats, voting means showing up once every four years and voting for President, which is why we see the results we see). They ARE, on the other hand, all excited about Bernie Sanders, and convinced that electing him will save and change the world (though if you try to engage them on how that might happen specifically, you'll usually be treated to a rather depressing lesson on the failure of our education system to instruct people on how our government actually works).
But let's suppose we actually did all of those impossible things I list above. After you do that, the idea that we're EVER going to know what happened to most of the money from most of these contracts over the past twenty years is looney. The amount of human manpower needed to go back and perform all incomplete audits just during Obama's Administration would be prohibitively expensive ... which brings me around to my overall point: articles like the one I saw being referenced today prey on people's existing prejudices (ooh, I don't like the military, therefore everything they do MUST be super evil and corrupt and everybody there must be equally evil and corrupt, which is just bullshit). They also sensationalize and get people all pissed off about a problem that's endemic to ANY sufficiently sized bureaucracy (again, you think the Defense Department is alone here?), and finally (and most importantly), they leave the reader mad at the wrong people ... the people in the Pentagon are NOT to blame here (just as the Banks are NOT to blame for our financial crisis). In fact, whether you believe it or not, this problem pisses them off more than you. People interested in actually FIXING the problem should be hyper-focused on seizing and maintaining control of their STATE legislatures and working up from there ... that's EXACTLY how the religious right seized power in this country ... but since that's just not as sexy as yelling about Wall Street and "feeling the bern" and since we can't get people to VOTE for more than one office more than once every four years, basically, we're screwed ... and, as usual, there's really only one way to fix that isn't there .........
©2015
OK, I need to stop writing about politics soon and get back to science and/or science fiction, because this crap is depressing!
That said, I need to give you at least one more rant from my position as radical centrist. This week, it's my friends on my far left that are driving me nuts. A number of people on social media this morning have rediscovered an article from early June of this year. The article makes a fairly incredible and frightening claim about our nation's military spending. The headline reads, "Report Reveals $8.5 Trillion Missing From Pentagon Budget." Now that's a headline that will get the attention of just about ALL of my "long haired, sandal wearing hippie" friends (and be clear, I have a LOT of them). Unfortunately, despite being very intelligent about a number of things, many of these friends let headlines like this trip what I call the "stupid switch" in their heads. Now, before my conservative friends start laughing, we ALL have stupid switches (and don't start throwing stones conservative friends, because, especially now, you guys live in houses with a LOT of glass). A person's stupid switch is what causes them to say, do or think something because someone else says or does something that fundamentally aligns with a (usually less than totally rational) bias in their head. So when you're fundamentally inclined to be opposed to military spending because you feel your nation's spending priorities are out of whack and because you've been exposed to some legitimate, specific examples of waste, fraud and abuse in defense contracts in the past, and you marry that inclination with a bombastic headline, well, stand back, because the ocean of self-righteous indignation can't be far behind (and again, conservative friends, I encourage you to hold your tongues, because your people have elevated self-righteous indignation to a freaking art form). Unfortunately, I'm easily distracted from the crap I'm supposed to be doing today, so when I saw this headline, article, and the corresponding hullabaloo, I felt the need to comment.
So let me start by noting that, when we're talking about money in government budgets, there's a BIG difference between "missing" (aka unaccounted for) and flat out wasted or stolen (although wasted is a frankly subjective term, so let's stick with what an auditor would define as fraud or theft). With respect to the specific claim in the articles, first, the total dollar figure spans a TWENTY YEAR period. Now, that's still an average of just over $400 BILLION per year, so we're still talking about a LOT of money, but remember, the headline writers want you to be outraged and angry in the streets, ready to fight with your friends. We can't have people walking around calmly saying, "hey, let's have a calm and rational discussion about this potentially disturbing issue," I mean, who would tune in for that? But let's get back to the issue here of the galactically large difference between missing/unaccounted for and stolen/fraud.
A deeper look into this issue quickly reveals that the overwhelming bulk of the money involved here is NOT, in actual point of fact, an example of theft, waste, fraud or abuse (SOME of it very well COULD be, but we don't KNOW that). No, what we're talking about is that there are trillions of dollars worth of government defense contracts that are simply unaudited. That does NOT automatically mean malfeasance or fraud, it means they don't know what happened to the money. I have no doubt that, in and among all of that money, there's probably a good deal of government waste to be found, but the article's title and implication are both VERY misleading in that the reader is meant to instantly conclude that ALL of the money involved MUST have been wasted.
With that having been said, I absolutely do agree that this is a pretty big problem, and pointing the finger of blame for it is pretty easy. You see, the problem began (in my view, very un-coincidentally) with the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s. Upon taking control of Congress, the Republicans actively took actions (mostly in terms of funding and resources) to discourage the normal level of auditing to take place. As a former military officer, I feel very comfortable saying that this failure to adequately care about, fund, monitor and follow up on the audit processes at the Pentagon was one that frustrated, irritated and just plain pissed off the people inside the Pentagon as much or more than anyone else (they don't like it when contracts don't get audited either and they absolutely DO want to know where the money is going). And it wouldn't take long at all for this backlog of audits problem to balloon completely out of control.
Many of you reading this are probably also relatively unfamiliar with the frankly inconceivable size and scope of what's involved in a military audit. To help you out, allow me to first familiarize you with the military's general rule regarding paperwork: if it moves, make a copy of it, if it doesn't move, make copies of it until it does. Second, let me tell you a brief story about my lone experience with an audit at the Pentagon.
In the early 1990s I was a Department Head at a Navy shore command in Rhode Island. As part of my job, I was in charge of the deck, admin and supply divisions (which is to say that I had fiduciary responsibilities). I was also the Command's Legal Officer. During my time there, another officer filed a formal discrimination complaint against my Commanding Officer. Not long after this, the command's Executive Officer (XO) called me into his office to direct me to assist in the command's defense regarding the officer's allegations. Part of that defense required me to audit a small contract, which immediately looked fishy to me (because the signature on one of the documents wasn't an officer whose name I recognized, and it wasn't a senior officer associated with our command, and it normally should have been). I noted my confusion to the XO. He was grateful that I cared more than he did, happy to assign me to do all the work, and promptly returned to the 12 inch tall stack of junk in his inbox.
I crossed the street to our base's command office and took the odd document in question to the Base Commander's secretary (who, of course, I knew). I asked her about the officer whose name appeared on the document. She assured me that the officer did not exist. I then made the mistake of asking if she was sure. She looked at me with relatively forgiving and only slightly condescending eyes and said, "Lieutenant, I have been in this job for over 20 years, I absolutely guarantee you that, not only is there no Captain by that name attached to any part of this base right now, but there has, in fact, never been a Captain by that name attached to this base in the entire time I have worked here." I lowered my head apologetically and retreated.
Fortunately for me, the Navy has this wonderful tool called the Blue Book. In the Blue Book is the name of every officer who has ever served in the history of the United States Navy. Surely, I thought, I will find this missing officer in the Blue Book and then be a lot closer to finding out why he was involved in the first place, etc.
He wasn't there.
Not only was there not an officer by that name in the Navy at that time, but, in the entire history of the United States Navy, there had NEVER been an officer with the name typed and signed on these orders. Well NOW I had a mystery.
Fortunately, this is the United States Military ... and like the X-Files, the truth is almost always "out there" ... somewhere, you just have to be willing to suffer to get it ... and when I say suffer, I mean paperwork.
The military loves paperwork more than pretty much any other entity on Earth, and a side effect of that affection is that there is almost never a piece of paper in the military that isn't attached, in some way, to lots of other pieces of paper. In this case, the contract I was dealing with included a set of orders, and they in turn were connected to actual payments on the contract. Unfortunately, the events involved were so long ago, that the only copies of relevant documents remaining were in the Pentagon archives. I returned to my XO and told him that the command needed to pay my way down to D.C. so that I could track down the documents in question. I was on the highway to D.C. only a few hours later.
I had never been to the Pentagon archives. In fact, to be honest, I hadn't known that the Pentagon archives existed (probably should have, but I didn't). I drove up to a very nondescript, three story tall, long, thin building in the D.C. area. I was frankly unimpressed with the building and its size, but I was also relieved because, in looking at the building I thought, "how hard can it be to find the right documents here?" I walked in the door, showed my orders to the guard, and was eventually told to go to the elevator, go to level B and wait for assistance. I did as I was instructed, but I was completely unprepared for what happened next.
Level B was several floors below ground (and I'm guessing from the time in the elevator it was at least 4 floors down). When the elevator doors opened, I walked out and my eyes went as wide as possible. I was inside a space that was several football fields large. Directly in front of me, on the well polished tile floor, were painted driving lanes (a mini version of what you'd see on the street). Within seconds an electric golf cart pulled up and a young man said, "Lt. Burghard?" I showed him what I was looking for. He studied the document for a moment and said, "OK, hop in."
We drove for several minutes through the "roads" in this incredibly cavernous space, past endless rows of shelves that were filled, from floor to ceiling, with folders and papers. The size and scope of the space was simply beyond my imagination. Finally, we arrived. My escort parked his golf cart and said, "we have to walk from here." Eventually we found the file on the contract that my documents referenced. The contract however, was for a pest control seminar involving personnel for a command that was nearly 200 miles away from ours. And then, there it was. Attached to the Pentagon records, there were references to TWO checks. One at the correct command, and one at our base.
Since you're probably interested in what happened at this point, before I go back to my main point let me quickly tell you what happened. Upon making this discovery, I immediately knew that we were dealing with an instance of fraud against the United States Government, which meant that I was about to be acting beyond the scope of my authority. So I contacted NIS (the Naval Investigative Service). An agent met with me two days later. I gave him the results of my audit, he thanked me and went away. A few weeks later he returned to my office with security pictures from a local bank and asked me if I could identify the individuals in the picture (the agent had tracked the second check to this bank at this date and time). I recognized the young man (fortunately NOT one of my people, in fact not even attached to my command), and, behind him in the corner, the officer who had filed the complaint against our Commanding Officer. Both men left the building that day in handcuffs. Both men went to prison.
Now, here's why I told you that story.
Think about the size and scope of what it took for little old me to do a simple audit on a small contract ... and now consider the task of auditing trillions of dollars of contracts dating back twenty years. Even if we had the political will (and we don't), the sheer size and scope of the auditing job to be done at this point is beyond what is possible. There aren't enough people or enough hours in the day. You'd have to recall THOUSANDS of people to active duty (and very specific people, people like me, officers with auditing experience) and you'd need to create a literal army of auditors. That alone is NEVER going to happen for dozens of reasons, but even if you somehow could, then you'd have to have some kind of organized and methodical approach to the audits, then you'd have to give the auditors authority to interrupt the current work of hundreds of thousands of troops and contractors and employees (which would be insanely costly to them) and, most importantly, you'd have to have hyper-specific guidelines regarding what constitutes waste, fraud and abuse ... AND, then you'd need a MASSIVE army of lawyers to follow up on the results of those audits ... and remember that, to be cost effective, each of those prosecutions has to make the government more money than all of the above costed (which is INCREDIBLY unlikely).
My point here is that it is incredibly hard for the Department of Defense to keep up with its existing audit responsibilities under ideal conditions, much less under conditions when the resources and manpower needed for the task are being squeezed out of existence. I should also note that I have serious doubts that the Department of Defense is somehow unique in having this problem. My guess is that a specific, intentional effort to reduce the frequency and efficacy of government audits is a government wide issue and that, yes, the blame, if any, for this fact belongs more with Congressional Republicans than any other group.
Since I can hear the stupid switches of my left leaning friends suddenly tripping again, and since I feel the need to try to say something positive about how to "fix" this gigantic problem, let me see if I can address the best way to do that. Basically, right now, it's impossible. Not only do you not have the necessary political will, but you have a party in power that has no interest in solving the problem. And removing them is not going to happen overnight (this leads to a somewhat separate rant about gerrymandering that will have to wait for another day). To "fix" the problem, you need to replace the Representatives causing it. Given how gerrymandered their districts are, you are VERY unlikely to do that by simply trying to run good candidates against them in a majority of those districts. That plan simply won't work (and we know this because it consistently hasn't). You have to travel farther down the food chain, specifically, to the STATE legislatures. Control of the state legislature, in most cases, gives your party control of the redistricting process which, after the next census, in theory, gives you your first rational chance at shifting the balance of power. Sadly, for my left leaning friends, this is spectacularly unlikely. Why? Because, if you haven't noticed from their Facebook feeds, NONE of them are getting all excited and frothy about their state rep candidates. In fact, most of them don't even VOTE for their state rep candidates (for far too many Democrats, voting means showing up once every four years and voting for President, which is why we see the results we see). They ARE, on the other hand, all excited about Bernie Sanders, and convinced that electing him will save and change the world (though if you try to engage them on how that might happen specifically, you'll usually be treated to a rather depressing lesson on the failure of our education system to instruct people on how our government actually works).
But let's suppose we actually did all of those impossible things I list above. After you do that, the idea that we're EVER going to know what happened to most of the money from most of these contracts over the past twenty years is looney. The amount of human manpower needed to go back and perform all incomplete audits just during Obama's Administration would be prohibitively expensive ... which brings me around to my overall point: articles like the one I saw being referenced today prey on people's existing prejudices (ooh, I don't like the military, therefore everything they do MUST be super evil and corrupt and everybody there must be equally evil and corrupt, which is just bullshit). They also sensationalize and get people all pissed off about a problem that's endemic to ANY sufficiently sized bureaucracy (again, you think the Defense Department is alone here?), and finally (and most importantly), they leave the reader mad at the wrong people ... the people in the Pentagon are NOT to blame here (just as the Banks are NOT to blame for our financial crisis). In fact, whether you believe it or not, this problem pisses them off more than you. People interested in actually FIXING the problem should be hyper-focused on seizing and maintaining control of their STATE legislatures and working up from there ... that's EXACTLY how the religious right seized power in this country ... but since that's just not as sexy as yelling about Wall Street and "feeling the bern" and since we can't get people to VOTE for more than one office more than once every four years, basically, we're screwed ... and, as usual, there's really only one way to fix that isn't there .........
Friday, September 4, 2015
PROW: When the Stupid Literally Hurts ...
by Duane N. Burghard
©2015
Sorry I've been away for a few weeks. After my last essay, I returned to working on my second novel a bit, and then on my business, and then on a new business project ... and somewhere in there, I kind of lost my blog voice (which happens) for a moment. Fortunately, as is frequently the case these days, Facebook was there to rescue me today.
So today's Political Rant Of the Week (PROW) comes to us courtesy of the State of Colorado ... not for something they're doing that's particularly stupid, but for something they're doing that's actually quite brilliant, helpful and generally good, but that they're going to stop doing ... and in this case, the stupidity of stopping will quite literally hurt.
In 2009, Children's Hospital Colorado (near Denver) and a number of other hospitals in the state, began an intentional and focused effort to increase the presence and use of pregnancy preventing implants (e.g. IUDs) in teenage females. Their intent was to lower the number of unwanted pregnancies among young people and, simultaneously (obviously) lower the number of abortions performed. Unlike the pill or condoms, IUDs are statistically far more effective at preventing pregnancy (they also don't have to be thought of immediately in advance of sexual contact). Unfortunately, a very small percentage of teenagers use them, and part of the reason why is that, unlike the pill or a condom, IUDs are significantly more expensive (hundreds of dollars) and can only be implanted by trained professionals, adding even more to the cost. To overcome the funding problem, the state of Colorado was given a $23 million grant from the Susan Buffet Foundation (and yes, Susan Buffet is billionaire Warren Buffet's wife).
So what happened? Well what do you think happened?? By 2013, teen births in Colorado had dropped by FORTY percent (substantially more than the nationwide drop for the same period). Statistics for 2014 haven't been officially released yet, but officials have noted that the number has continued to decline. Similarly, the number of abortions performed on teenagers in Colorado has also dropped significantly during the period.
So what do we have here; teen pregnancy is down, abortions are down and births to teens are down. I HOPE that we can all agree that these are all good things. But that's not all. You see, when teen births go down, all sorts of other good things happen too. Colorado's Medicaid expenses have gone down as a result. With fewer teen births there is a savings in government assistance. More of those teenagers are finishing high school and going on to lives where they will earn more, pay more in taxes, and have more opportunities. These all seem like really good things. They also seem like the sorts of things you'd want to see continue, right?
Apparently not.
You see, the money from the Buffet foundation recently ran out, and so Colorado's Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper (yes, that's his real name) went to his state assembly to get the money to continue this program, a program which, had it been using state funds all along, WOULD HAVE BEEN PROFITABLE in that it has saved the state more than the $23 million the Buffet foundation has invested ... and that's where the trouble began. Republican State lawmakers (a generous title indeed given all they do to NOT make laws) say that the program is too expensive and that it "sends the wrong message" to teenagers. Some have raised concerns about the program leading to an increase in Sexually Transmitted Diseases (though there is, to date, not a shred of evidence to support that fear).
It's at this point that several "rant alerts" go off in my head. I'll see if I can get them coherently organized for you (no promises).
First, let's talk about being pro-life. While I'm sure it will not surprise any of you, I am firmly in the camp that has long been known (and somewhat badly named) as "pro-choice" ... which, incidentally, is the same camp that many if not most Republicans belonged to before Reagan. Although you would be forgiven for not knowing this today, it is in fact true that it was the Republican Party that first endorsed the landmark "Roe v Wade" decision back in 1973. They endorsed Roe because it was consistent with their conservative "hands off" approach to government. They recognized that the decision had less to do with abortion and more to do with not letting the government have a hand in deciding what we can and cannot do with our bodies (legally speaking it was about the interpretation of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment ... in any case the decision was and is consistent with an actually conservative approach to governance by a state). Today, sadly, pro-life has come to simply mean "pro-birth" and there is precious little (if any) interest in the life of the individual once they are born. But the one thing that I thought the so called pro-life community and I could universally agree upon, was that lowering the number of unwanted pregnancies and the number of abortions is a good thing. So when we see a program that is empirically lowering the number of abortions (AND SAVING MONEY), it would seem to be a "no brainer" that we could all agree that funding such a program would be a good thing. Alas, no, it turns out that, in this case, logicians need not apply.
So let's talk about sex. One Colorado State Rep said that she thought that funding the program would send the wrong message. She said that the message was, "feel free to have sex with everybody." Now, just so we're clear, I haven't been a teenager in just over 31 years, but I did used to be one, my children are teenagers, and I have been able to keep up on what they're generally like over the years. In my experience, the desire to have sex is a pretty universal desire of the average teenager. Certainly when I was a teenager, I was rather ... focused, on members of the opposite sex. And by the way, if I may run off track into a separate rant for a moment and attack this ABSURD school dress code issue that we're seeing today ... I'd like to be CLEAR that, when I was a teenager, if I thought you were attractive, what you were wearing made absolutely NO difference whatsoever (and if I wasn't that into you, your attire similarly made no difference ... I know this is true for girls too because I dressed the way I did and yet several girls still actually went out with me). Telling girls that THEY are responsible for what guys think or do as a result of what they wear IS in fact a perpetuation of rape culture (not to mention an incredible insult to men who are being told that they're not capable of controlling themselves or acting responsibly). The bottom line is that, regardless of what a girl is wearing, a guy either wants to have sex with her or he doesn't, and either way he IS still fully responsible for controlling himself AND for paying attention in class.
But this is nothing new. Teenagers have been wanting to have sex since before the term teenager was invented. And the idea that we can train people out of this desire (especially in a society whose members do NOT all share the same religious or moral background or beliefs) is without a single example of success. In fact, the states which spend the most and place the greatest emphasis on abstinence only education are the same states that have the highest rates of unwanted teen pregnancies. And according to Advocates for Youth.org (and their website references a number of empirical studies) there is NO statistical evidence that "youth enrolled in abstinence only programs were any more likely than those not in the programs to delay sexual initiation, to have fewer sexual partners, or to abstain entirely from sex." Put simply (in deference to those who apparently need it to be put simply): IT DOESN'T WORK.
So we have a program that, empirically, is lowering teen pregnancy, preventing abortions and saving the state money ... ALL of these things are things that the Colorado Republican Party SAYS they are interested in ... and yet a large number of them oppose funding this program. And this brings me neatly around to my last mini-rant of the day: State Legislatures.
As incredible as it is for me to see on my screen as I type it, this December will mark the 10th Anniversary of my announcement to run for Congress in 2006. One day I will write about that amazing experience and the many good and bad things I learned about our system and how it "really works" (from the standpoint of a candidate), but for now let me say that one of the things that became increasingly important to me during that campaign was ensuring the success of "downballot" candidates (specifically people running for the State House and State Senate seats in my US Congressional District). In fact, one of the things that I am most proud of was that, even though I didn't win that year, a significant number of people within the party credited me with keeping my opponent so busy and spending so much money on defeating me, that he didn't have time to do his normal interfering work (funding and working for downballot candidates) in other races. As a result, to this day, many people in the party give me partial credit for the election of several downballot candidates. Why is that a big deal? Well, despite the lack of money and sexiness in those races, your state legislature is enormously important and, in actual fact, has a far greater impact on you and your daily life than you might think (including the fact that most state legislatures get to draw these ridiculously gerrymandered US Congressional District lines which intentionally protect (most Republican) Congressmen ... and that protection makes them less willing to compromise and more prone to the gridlock we so often see today).
So at the end of the day, what do we have? We have a program that's working, saving money, preventing unwanted pregnancy and lowering the number abortions. It seems to me that ending such a program would be, to quote Stephen Colbert, just about the dumbest f*cking thing I've ever heard (and I would remind my readers that the preceding designation was NOT intended to be a competition ... though it does seem to be working out that way) ... but sadly, that's probably what's going to happen. Yes, Colorado can look forward now to a future with increased abortion, higher teen pregnancy and higher social program costs. And why? Well, mostly because so many of the citizens of the State of Colorado just don't take a greater and more interested role in who is representing them in their state house (I say this because the number of people who vote for state representatives in most districts is decided lower than those who vote for statewide or federal candidates in those same districts). As a result of this lack of interest and participation, we once again all get to live with the will of the majority ... of organized people who vote ... and there's really only one way to fix that isn't there?
©2015
Sorry I've been away for a few weeks. After my last essay, I returned to working on my second novel a bit, and then on my business, and then on a new business project ... and somewhere in there, I kind of lost my blog voice (which happens) for a moment. Fortunately, as is frequently the case these days, Facebook was there to rescue me today.
So today's Political Rant Of the Week (PROW) comes to us courtesy of the State of Colorado ... not for something they're doing that's particularly stupid, but for something they're doing that's actually quite brilliant, helpful and generally good, but that they're going to stop doing ... and in this case, the stupidity of stopping will quite literally hurt.
In 2009, Children's Hospital Colorado (near Denver) and a number of other hospitals in the state, began an intentional and focused effort to increase the presence and use of pregnancy preventing implants (e.g. IUDs) in teenage females. Their intent was to lower the number of unwanted pregnancies among young people and, simultaneously (obviously) lower the number of abortions performed. Unlike the pill or condoms, IUDs are statistically far more effective at preventing pregnancy (they also don't have to be thought of immediately in advance of sexual contact). Unfortunately, a very small percentage of teenagers use them, and part of the reason why is that, unlike the pill or a condom, IUDs are significantly more expensive (hundreds of dollars) and can only be implanted by trained professionals, adding even more to the cost. To overcome the funding problem, the state of Colorado was given a $23 million grant from the Susan Buffet Foundation (and yes, Susan Buffet is billionaire Warren Buffet's wife).
So what happened? Well what do you think happened?? By 2013, teen births in Colorado had dropped by FORTY percent (substantially more than the nationwide drop for the same period). Statistics for 2014 haven't been officially released yet, but officials have noted that the number has continued to decline. Similarly, the number of abortions performed on teenagers in Colorado has also dropped significantly during the period.
So what do we have here; teen pregnancy is down, abortions are down and births to teens are down. I HOPE that we can all agree that these are all good things. But that's not all. You see, when teen births go down, all sorts of other good things happen too. Colorado's Medicaid expenses have gone down as a result. With fewer teen births there is a savings in government assistance. More of those teenagers are finishing high school and going on to lives where they will earn more, pay more in taxes, and have more opportunities. These all seem like really good things. They also seem like the sorts of things you'd want to see continue, right?
Apparently not.
You see, the money from the Buffet foundation recently ran out, and so Colorado's Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper (yes, that's his real name) went to his state assembly to get the money to continue this program, a program which, had it been using state funds all along, WOULD HAVE BEEN PROFITABLE in that it has saved the state more than the $23 million the Buffet foundation has invested ... and that's where the trouble began. Republican State lawmakers (a generous title indeed given all they do to NOT make laws) say that the program is too expensive and that it "sends the wrong message" to teenagers. Some have raised concerns about the program leading to an increase in Sexually Transmitted Diseases (though there is, to date, not a shred of evidence to support that fear).
It's at this point that several "rant alerts" go off in my head. I'll see if I can get them coherently organized for you (no promises).
First, let's talk about being pro-life. While I'm sure it will not surprise any of you, I am firmly in the camp that has long been known (and somewhat badly named) as "pro-choice" ... which, incidentally, is the same camp that many if not most Republicans belonged to before Reagan. Although you would be forgiven for not knowing this today, it is in fact true that it was the Republican Party that first endorsed the landmark "Roe v Wade" decision back in 1973. They endorsed Roe because it was consistent with their conservative "hands off" approach to government. They recognized that the decision had less to do with abortion and more to do with not letting the government have a hand in deciding what we can and cannot do with our bodies (legally speaking it was about the interpretation of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment ... in any case the decision was and is consistent with an actually conservative approach to governance by a state). Today, sadly, pro-life has come to simply mean "pro-birth" and there is precious little (if any) interest in the life of the individual once they are born. But the one thing that I thought the so called pro-life community and I could universally agree upon, was that lowering the number of unwanted pregnancies and the number of abortions is a good thing. So when we see a program that is empirically lowering the number of abortions (AND SAVING MONEY), it would seem to be a "no brainer" that we could all agree that funding such a program would be a good thing. Alas, no, it turns out that, in this case, logicians need not apply.
So let's talk about sex. One Colorado State Rep said that she thought that funding the program would send the wrong message. She said that the message was, "feel free to have sex with everybody." Now, just so we're clear, I haven't been a teenager in just over 31 years, but I did used to be one, my children are teenagers, and I have been able to keep up on what they're generally like over the years. In my experience, the desire to have sex is a pretty universal desire of the average teenager. Certainly when I was a teenager, I was rather ... focused, on members of the opposite sex. And by the way, if I may run off track into a separate rant for a moment and attack this ABSURD school dress code issue that we're seeing today ... I'd like to be CLEAR that, when I was a teenager, if I thought you were attractive, what you were wearing made absolutely NO difference whatsoever (and if I wasn't that into you, your attire similarly made no difference ... I know this is true for girls too because I dressed the way I did and yet several girls still actually went out with me). Telling girls that THEY are responsible for what guys think or do as a result of what they wear IS in fact a perpetuation of rape culture (not to mention an incredible insult to men who are being told that they're not capable of controlling themselves or acting responsibly). The bottom line is that, regardless of what a girl is wearing, a guy either wants to have sex with her or he doesn't, and either way he IS still fully responsible for controlling himself AND for paying attention in class.
But this is nothing new. Teenagers have been wanting to have sex since before the term teenager was invented. And the idea that we can train people out of this desire (especially in a society whose members do NOT all share the same religious or moral background or beliefs) is without a single example of success. In fact, the states which spend the most and place the greatest emphasis on abstinence only education are the same states that have the highest rates of unwanted teen pregnancies. And according to Advocates for Youth.org (and their website references a number of empirical studies) there is NO statistical evidence that "youth enrolled in abstinence only programs were any more likely than those not in the programs to delay sexual initiation, to have fewer sexual partners, or to abstain entirely from sex." Put simply (in deference to those who apparently need it to be put simply): IT DOESN'T WORK.
So we have a program that, empirically, is lowering teen pregnancy, preventing abortions and saving the state money ... ALL of these things are things that the Colorado Republican Party SAYS they are interested in ... and yet a large number of them oppose funding this program. And this brings me neatly around to my last mini-rant of the day: State Legislatures.
As incredible as it is for me to see on my screen as I type it, this December will mark the 10th Anniversary of my announcement to run for Congress in 2006. One day I will write about that amazing experience and the many good and bad things I learned about our system and how it "really works" (from the standpoint of a candidate), but for now let me say that one of the things that became increasingly important to me during that campaign was ensuring the success of "downballot" candidates (specifically people running for the State House and State Senate seats in my US Congressional District). In fact, one of the things that I am most proud of was that, even though I didn't win that year, a significant number of people within the party credited me with keeping my opponent so busy and spending so much money on defeating me, that he didn't have time to do his normal interfering work (funding and working for downballot candidates) in other races. As a result, to this day, many people in the party give me partial credit for the election of several downballot candidates. Why is that a big deal? Well, despite the lack of money and sexiness in those races, your state legislature is enormously important and, in actual fact, has a far greater impact on you and your daily life than you might think (including the fact that most state legislatures get to draw these ridiculously gerrymandered US Congressional District lines which intentionally protect (most Republican) Congressmen ... and that protection makes them less willing to compromise and more prone to the gridlock we so often see today).
So at the end of the day, what do we have? We have a program that's working, saving money, preventing unwanted pregnancy and lowering the number abortions. It seems to me that ending such a program would be, to quote Stephen Colbert, just about the dumbest f*cking thing I've ever heard (and I would remind my readers that the preceding designation was NOT intended to be a competition ... though it does seem to be working out that way) ... but sadly, that's probably what's going to happen. Yes, Colorado can look forward now to a future with increased abortion, higher teen pregnancy and higher social program costs. And why? Well, mostly because so many of the citizens of the State of Colorado just don't take a greater and more interested role in who is representing them in their state house (I say this because the number of people who vote for state representatives in most districts is decided lower than those who vote for statewide or federal candidates in those same districts). As a result of this lack of interest and participation, we once again all get to live with the will of the majority ... of organized people who vote ... and there's really only one way to fix that isn't there?
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