The federal agency that brought us the $600 toilet seat and the $4,000 coffee pot is about to be dragged kicking and screaming into the cost-cutting 1990s.
After 12 years of riding the Reagan/Bush Cold War gravy train while the budget deficit spiraled out of control, the Pentagon is worried that it is about to be sacrificed at the altar of Bill Clinton's campaign promises to slash military spending as a way to control the ballooning budget deficit.
After decades of Cold War preparations, the Pentagon now looks like the agency that's all dressed up with no place to go. Yet it remains a favorite haven for congressional porkmeisters, where huge contracts and appropriations are still the currency of choice. With a $4 trillion national debt, consider some of the items our tax dollars are paying for:
- The 1992 Defense Appropriations Bill contains $25 million for an "Arctic region supercomputer," added to the budget as part of a controversial and so far unsuccessful government effort to trap energy from the aurora borealis in Alaska.
- $7 million to upgrade a physical fitness center at Fort Richardson, Alaska, as part of $33.9 million the government is paying to upgrade physical fitness facilities.
- $10 million has been pledged in an unauthorized grant to tiny Marywood College in Scranton, Pa., home of Rep. Joseph McDade, the ranking minority member of the House Defense Appropriations Committee. The grant, which makes up roughly one-third of the tiny school's annual budget, is for studying military stress on families. At this small Roman Catholic school of 3,000 students, even the recipients are baffled.
- $600,000 to establish two "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Treatment Center Demonstration Projects." One of these is to be located in Greensburg, Pa., because it has suffered the most wartime casualties of any community in the country. The other center is earmarked for Hawaii, home of the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee, Sen. Daniel Inouye, a Democrat.
After years of scandals and countless promises to reform, congressional auditors still rank the Pentagon high among the government agencies most vulnerable to fraud, waste and mismanagement. Part of this, the government says, is pinned on a Pentagon "culture" that thrives on new programs, even as the rest of the government is getting squeezed.
The B-2 bomber - a Cold War weapon in a post-Cold War era - keeps its funding year after year, while public housing programs and infrastructure plans sit on drawing boards.
While the new programs keep coming, the Pentagon is sitting on more than $40 billion of excess and unneeded inventory, the byproduct of a 10-year spending binge. If the Pentagon threw a garage sale, it might help to discover more than $30 billion in "unrequired inventory" that cannot be recovered because the money has already been spent. Between 1980 and 1990, the value of the Department of Defense's inventory of "secondary items" (spare parts, clothing, medical supplies, etc.) grew from $43 billion to $100 billion.
The Pentagon seems to have lost control of its own warehouses. When government auditors tried to match the physical inventory of the Air Force Logistics Command with Air Force records, they discovered that nearly 20 percent of the records were inaccurate. Besides wasting money, the Pentagon's inventory problems have also made it an ideal target for crime.