Taxpayers Bilked by Military Contractors

In an article, titled New report finds big problems in war spending, the Associated Press writes about an 111 page report by the Wartime Contracting Commission that will be presented to congress on Wednesday. Here are a few excerpts from it:

• Construction of a $30 million dining facility at a U.S. base in Iraq is scheduled to be completed Dec. 25. ... The project is too far along to stop, making the mess hall a future monument to the waste and inefficiency plaguing the war effort, according to an independent panel investigating contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• More than 240,000 private sector employees are supporting military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The Pentagon has failed to provide enough trained staff to watch over them, creating conditions for waste and corruption, the commission says.
• In Iraq, the panel worries that as U.S. troops depart in larger numbers, there will be too few government eyes on the contractors left to oversee the closing of hundreds of bases and disposal of mountains of federal property.
• One commander in Afghanistan told the commission he had no idea how many contractors were on and off his base on a daily basis.
• Despite the huge size and importance of the contract, the main program office managing the work for both Afghanistan and Iraq has only 13 government employees. For administrative help, it must rely on a contractor.
• The commission says billions of dollars of that amount ended up wasted due to poorly defined work orders, inadequate oversight and contractor inefficiencies.

240,000 contractors.. did I read that right? This kind of waste is simply nauseating but.. for anyone who has ever worked for the government or served in the military.. it is not surprising. Let's hope that congress and the Pentagon will take note of the report.. did I really say that? Oh well lets just hope for the best.