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 .........
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