Oinkers
by dday
Oh great, the geniuses at Citizens Against Government Waste have rolled out their latest Congressional Pig Book, and they had a big press conference in DC, complete with actual pigs (har!), humiliating and shaming all those Congresscritters who feed themselves at the trough (get it?) with these wasteful pork-barrel projects that blow a hole in the federal budget. $17 billion dollars worth of pork in those 12 appropriations bills. $17 billion!
Ahem.
Government auditors issued a scathing review yesterday of dozens of the Pentagon's biggest weapons systems, saying ships, aircraft and satellites are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.
The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that the GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages.
Auditors said the Defense Department showed few signs of improvement since the GAO began issuing its annual assessments of selected weapons systems six years ago. "It's not getting any better by any means," said Michael Sullivan, director of the GAO's acquisition and sourcing team. "It's taking longer and costing more."
The CGAW designation of what is "porkbarrel" spending is not qualitative, based entirely on the technical method in which spending requests are inserted into appropriations bills. They could be money for museums or research and development, all the way up to infrastructure improvements (next time someone goes on and on about "pork" say something like "Yeah, I know, I hate fixing bridges so they don't collapse with people on them..."). The GAO designation of these overruns in the weapons projects reflect the discrepancy between the original budget and the final cost. Which is kind of the definition of, you know, waste. $295 billion in waste versus $17 billion, some of which is waste. Sounds like Citizens Against Government Waste has the right target, don't you think?
This is actually one of the more important things we have to fix. The Congressional Pig Book is a made-for-TV event, particularly local TV, and it saps trust in government completely out of proportion to the military contractors who are routinely holding up the treasury at a rate 20 times higher than any earmark request. The fact that conservatives lead in earmark requests is immaterial. Citizens Against Government Waste is a cog in the conservative machine, promoting a myth of "runaway spending" without relating it to where the spending actually comes from. The real black hole in the budget is unaccountable military spending, and our side needs to do a better job of exposing this. I remember the "ten thousand dollar hammer" from the 80s, but a year ago the Pentagon paid a million dollars to ship two 19-cent washers and it barely caused a ripple. Obama is running on temporarily increasing the military budget so we're kind of screwed here. The goal needs to be about defining the Pentagon's contracting system as unnecessarily and intentionally wasteful, to shame the Congress into getting serious about waste, fraud and abuse in contracting, and to eliminate it completely. It's a long-term project but it starts with the kind of mockery revealed in something turnkey like the "Pig Book."
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