Abstract
Marvin Sambur, the U.S. air force acquisitions chief, had a slice of humble pie stuffed down his throat at a House subcommittee hearing the other day. Most of those asking the questions weren't buying his explanations for the array of troublesome cost-control and testing-related problems plaguing the F/A-22 fighter program. Yet none of those asking the questions knew at the time that the budget for the program (which will produce $257 million-per-copy aircraft) had jumped by $2 billion during the last quarter of 2002 alone–and Sambur never thought to bring it up.
It must have slipped his memory.
Lucky for the taxpayers, the very next day a con-gressionally mandated series of reports known as SARs, or Selected Acquisition Reports, set the record straight and kept this mammoth budget buster from becoming yet another Pentagon secret.
Keeping the public in the dark is a Pentagon specialty, so it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that the Defense Department has been looking for one more way to work in the shadows: Its annual legislative wish list this year boldly requested the elimination of nearly every congressionally mandated report that details cost, schedule, and performance information on major weapons systems.
The F/A-22 report is only one of more than 100 reporting requirements the Pentagon is trying to eliminate. The department also wants to skip writing reports that require transparency in programs ranging from the nation's multi-billion-dollar missile defense program to the state of military readiness. In a May 13 letter to the House leadership, Congs. Henry Waxman and Ike Skelton pointed out that if Congress agreed, the missile defense program would have “unprecedented spending authority enjoyed by no other federal agency.”
To hear the Pentagon generals and bureaucrats explain it, the reports should be eliminated because they are boring, complicated, and way too time-consuming to prepare–not to mention unnecessary. But nothing could be further from the truth–except maybe for the boring part. These reports are a pillar of congressional oversight and essential to watchdog groups like the Project On Government Oversight (the one I work for).
As the nation's defense budget returns to Cold War levels, we need as many pairs of eyes as possible watching the Pentagon. More money can only mean more opportunities for Defense to get into trouble: The department already has severe problems in more budget areas than you have fingers and toes, and about a gazillion or so dollars in expenditures that can't be accounted for–not to mention untold numbers of tanks, aircraft, and ships that are untraceable on paper. The General Accounting Office has been auditing the department for nearly a decade and so far the Pentagon has failed every annual financial exam it has undergone, yet suffered no negative consequences. (These days, the chief executive officer of a public corporation who couldn't get a clean audit would be gone quicker than you can say “Enron.”)
Sadly, the future doesn't really seem any more promising. In fact, one defense auditor recently told me he doesn't believe that the recent horrendous examples of public fraud and deceit have had any effect on oversight in the public sector. He said that he and his colleagues are routinely denied access to the books of defense contractors–even for records they are entitled to by law and regulation. The contractors only seem to be getting more arrogant and evasive, he said.
The Pentagon is coming off a strong win in Iraq, but as of this writing, Defense's request to eliminate the reports have not been included in the 2004 Defense Authorization Bill. Yet as any avid congressional observer knows, nothing is forever on Capitol Hill, and these types of provisions have a way of turning up in another bill or another amendment at another time.
It makes one wonder whether Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is serious about bringing sound business principles to “warfighting” departments or “transforming” the military to become a more relevant fighting force. If he really does have reform in mind, why does he want to keep it secret from the public? •