As Congress Seeks to Increase Pentagon Spending, More News of Taxpayer Money Wasted in Afghanistan

Even though Congress passed a budget before their Spring Break, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) expressed concerns with Defense spending.  The problem is that that the budget includes a spending request higher than what the President wanted. One particular problem is that the Overseas Contingency Operations Account (OCO) is still being used by Washington as a slush fund to get around spending caps is still a problem. In addition to OCO, there are plenty of opportunities for cutting waste and TPA was part of coalition urging specific ways to save money on Pentagon spending, without jeopardizing national security. Now, there is more news of money being wasted overseas funded through the OCO. Nobody’s interests are being served when men and women risk their lives overseas while billions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted.

First, a troubling story regarding the financial accounting of a program to help promote greater involvement for women in the development of Afghanistan’s emerging economy. Charlie Clark with Defense One reported last week that:

The newly inaugurated first lady of Afghanistan recently expressed skepticism about new spending on programs to promote the status of women in her country, a concern, it turns out, shared by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

IG John Sopko on Thursday sent a letter to the acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development with pointed questions on a plan to spend $416 million—a little over half from USAID and the rest from unnamed donors—on a program named “Promote” that USAID announced in July 2013.

The United States contributed nearly $216 million for a program that was supposed to be part of a five-year contract. John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), commented last year that, “Too often we’ve pushed taxpayer money out the door without considering if the Afghans need it and can sustain it.” Examples included in SIGAR’s report are:

• Disappearance of large amounts of munitions given to the Afghan security forces due to the Pentagon’s inability to properly track the weapons.
• Two C-130 transport planes (which cost $40.5 million each) will likely not be able to be used by Afghanistan.
• Nearly 300 buildings (i.e. barracks, fire stations, med clinics) have not been built up to international standards are hazardous.

The SIGAR released another report titled, Department of Defense Spending on Afghanistan Reconstruction: Contracts Compromised $21 Billion of $66 billion in Total Appropriations, 2002-May 2014, that detailed spending over more than a decade of engagement in the region. The report, is one of the most glaring examples of why the answer for Pentagon spending isn’t an increased budget, but greater accountability.  According to the report:

This report provides an analysis of the information from DOD’s submission. The submission accounts for approximately $21 billion in total contract awards. The discrepancy between this amount and the total appropriation is due to how DOD executed its Afghanistan Reconstruction Funding and how that execution was tracked within DOD and Federal accounting systems.

Matthew Gault with War is Boring explains how accountability is the key issue:

To be clear, the Pentagon didn’t technically do anything wrong. The rules just didn’t require it to report how it funded the contracts, so it didn’t. According to the Pentagon, hiring people now to go through millions of old contracts from the past decade would require too much time and money.

The rules on reporting foreign military sales changed in 2010, and the Pentagon has reported the information since then … but that doesn’t help resurrect eight years of Afghanistan contract information lost in a sea of data the Pentagon says is infeasible to sift through.

TPA, and many other groups, have been calling for an audit of the Pentagon for a long time. There is no question that with that kind of top-down financial accounting it would certainly go a long way to preventing future errors of such an epic scale as more than $40 billion of taxpayer money being unaccounted for after more than ten years.

The American people deserve much better from the investment that has been made in Afghanistan.  This recent news, adds to the already terrible track record of spending on defense.  Congress needs to understand that more spending isn’t the answer to a stronger defense, it is smarter spending.