The Department of Defense Routinely Waste Taxpayers' Money

Article 1.

In addition to wasteful spending, there is the issue of wasteful employees, many of whom do not carry their weight in the organization.

From my experience working for the Department of Defense (DoD), it takes 3-5 government employees to produce the same amount of work in the same amount of time as an employee in the private sector. The interesting thing is that what is produced is often of lower quality. And that my friend, is considered a "productive government team". If I go into groups that aren't productive, millions of dollars are wasted and nothing useful is produced. In fact, it's very tempting to be a DoD contractor because the rewards are high. Nevermind what they tell you about lowest bidder, lowest quality. They produce low quality because that's what they can produce. Over a decade ago, our team was contracted out between $127-$225/per person per hour. It was certainly one of the lower end contracts.

When you hear of the space shuttle using the cheapest parts and failing, it really has little to do with bidding at the lowest rate. In fact, the bidders are paid quite a bundle. It's just the DoD contracting firms are super cheap and want to make as much money as they can and rip off the government with cheesy parts and thus make even more money. It has to do with the lack of integrity of the company more than anything else. Did you know that these firms were making tons of money, as evidenced by what the upper management makes? Then when something goes wrong, the politdcal face saving excuse is "it's the low bidder low quality rule". Right! NOT!!

Here is an another example.

Why are taxpayers subsidizing welfare to corporations? If Bush wants to have spending cuts, this is the first place to start cutting. Otherwise he is just subsizing his friends on corporate welfare.

More news on defense spending.

"The US military budget was more than 30 times as large as the combined spending of the seven rogue states (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $13 billion."

"The seven potential enemies of the U.S. plus Russia and China together spent $134.2 billion, 34% of the U.S. military budget." Take a look at the graph.

Here's how some of our tax dollars are used: to train some of the worst human rights violators at the U.S. government's mercenary training school, the School of the Americas. Some of the worst dictators and human rights abusers have graduated from that school including Roberto D'Aubisson from El Salvador and Manuel Noriega of Panama.

Another take on military spending.