Editorial: Stop throwing away taxpayer money at Pentagon

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Instead of harping excessively on the alleged $4 billion cost of a new Air Force One aircraft, President-elect Donald Trump ought to set his sights on the squandering of a whopping $125 billion in taxpayer money by the Pentagon.

Once he is president, Trump should push the Pentagon to heed the recommendations of the Defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel that conducted the internal study to reduce wasteful administrative spending at the request of Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work. The panel released its report in January 2015, but it didn’t take long for the Pentagon to kill it.

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The Washington Post uncovered the panel’s findings and steps taken by the Pentagon to bury the study. The Defense Department had applied “secrecy restrictions” on data used for the study and had taken down a 77-page summary report by the panel from the Pentagon website, the newspaper reported.

So much for government transparency. And so much for common-sense solutions to bring down frivolous spending.

The panel recommended staff reductions through early retirements. It would have spared civil servants and military personnel from layoffs.

Other reductions could be achieved through cutbacks in accounting, resources, logistics, property management, the panel said. It also proposed reducing services from contractors and getting rid of obsolete technology.

All of this should have appealed to the Pentagon because the $125 billion saved over five years could be “redirected to critical warfighter priorities,” the panel wrote in its report. In other words, the money could go to troops and combat needs.

But Pentagon officials grew wary that Congress could become critical of its inefficiencies and gut its $580 billion budget. Their deceit, though, has invited scrutiny. Lawmakers on Tuesday called for a hearing on the study.

“If this is true, the Pentagon played Congress and the American public for fools,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who is about to become the top-ranking Democrat on an oversight panel.

During the campaign, Trump vowed to rebuild the military. He also promised to eliminate wasteful spending. “We are going to ask every department in government to provide a list of wasteful spending projects that we can eliminate in my first 100 days,” he said.

At the Pentagon, he knows where to start.

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