Pentagon could easily save $125 billion over 5 years in bureaucratic waste and inefficiency

The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.

Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

The 77 page report issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

US Federal Budget over Time

The federal budget has more than doubled since 1993 from $1.96 trillion to just short of $4 trillion. This is 20% faster than inflation and the budget in 1993 was not austere.

This shows that the government has been getting more bloated and wasteful over time.

This is not including complete overspending and misspending.

The Defense department buying the F35 for a total program cost of over $1 trillion when they acquire over 2000 planes.
Aircraft carriers costing $13 billion each and submarines about $5 billion each.
Spacex spending 320 times less to develop the dragon capsule compared to NASA spending on Orion. $200 billion of total spending on each of the Space Shuttle and the Space Station. The Space shuttle had 135 total launches. Heavy lift launches could have been had for at least ten times less cost.

SOURCE- Washington post