In fear that Congress would use findings of $125 billion to cut the defense budget, senior defense officials suppressed a study documenting the money. This was reported by the Washington Post late on Monday.
The advisory Defense Business Board (DBB), in a report in January 2015, called had called for a series of reforms of reforms that could have saved the department $125 billion over the next five years.
The Defense Department was paying just over 1 million contractors, civilian employees and uniformed personnel back-office jobs. This surfaced among other findings. This number now matches the amount of active duty troops. which is 1.3 million and the lowest since 1940.
The Post also reported that some Pentagon leaders were in fear the study’s findings would undermine their claims that years of budget sequestration had left the military short of money. They pulled a summary report from the Pentagon website and imposed restrictions on information used in the study, in response.
Pentagon leaders are in fear? Who or what does the Pentagon have to be afraid of? They fear Congress? Look at what our government has become.
Former DBB chairman Robert Stein told the Post, “They’re all complaining that they don’t have any money. We proposed a way to save money.”
The plan laid out in the report was “unrealistic,” Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, who originally ordered the study, told the paper.
Work said, “There is this meme that we’re some bloated, giant organization, although there is a little bit of truth in that … I think it vastly overstates what’s really going on.”
Some of the report’s recommendations were being implemented on a smaller scale and would save an estimated $30 billion by 2020, Work said but the Post reported that most of the programs had been planned for a long time or unrelated to the DBB report.