Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) released his annual Wastebook spending oversight report to highlight “wasteful and low-priority spending totaling nearly $30 billion,” which this year featured numerous military acquisition programs and community outreach efforts.
Coburn said he could not support the budget deal passed by the House of Representatives last week and set to pass in the Senate this week because it reduces sequestration, which some Republican lawmakers favor as a spending-reduction tool despite complaints from the Defense Department and others, in return for savings a decade from now that may never materialize.
“We’ve also had the Defense Department and people in the non-defense discretionary departments screaming about the cupboard is bare, there’s nothing else to cut,” he told reporters in a Tuesday morning press conference. “And the fact is that just isn’t true.”
Nine of the 100 entries on the list are defense-related programs, some of which Coburn said would be “foolish” under any circumstances and others which would be acceptable during a budget surplus but are a waste of limited resources given the nation’s debt.
“My favorite program in this is the fact that the Air Force bought $600 million in airplanes and as soon as they were delivered shipped them to the desert,” he said, referring to the C-27J Spartan cargo plane program. “And this is the same agency that’s going to leave $7 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan, wasted valuable equipment, because it’s too hard to utilize it in some other area of the world.”
Regarding the C-27J program, Coburn wrote in the 2013 Wastebook that because Congress chose to keep funding the program even after the Air Force testified it wanted to use the C-130 and not the C-27J, the service–on top of taking existing planes with very little use out of service–mothballed 16 new planes in September and would do the same to five more next year.
“What’s happening on these airplanes, for example, I’ve been raising Cain about them for about three months, is there’re now going to be transferred I think to either the Forest Service or the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Homeland Security,” Coburn told reporters. “So they’re going to get used eventually, but probably not in the way that they were most efficient.”
Coburn said he did not blame federal departments and agencies for the waste, but rather he put the blame squarely on Congress. He said lawmakers had abdicated their oversight roles and did not know enough about programs to write adequate authorization and appropriations bills.
“In my mind, if you wanted to save a hundred billion dollars a year at the Pentagon, you could do it without any difficulty, without affecting our readiness, our training or our supplies,” he said. The problem, he said, is “Republican defense authorizers and appropriators who don’t like limiting our spending and yet won’t do the hard work of eliminating the foolishness that is in the expenditures every year.”
Coburn said individual military leaders – base commanders, lab directors, program managers and more–were implementing good business policies as part of their own local initiatives and ought to be praised for those efforts. But the federal debt can only be tackled by “cutting a billion dollars at a time, cutting $30 billion at a time,” he said, and that job is on Congress.
The report blasted the military, and the Army in particular, for their plans to destroy $7 billion in equipment currently in Afghanistan rather than transport it out of country. Calling it the “mass destruction of weapons,” Coburn wrote in the report that the 2007 Congress was to blame for what is now showing itself to be a fiscal problem–lawmakers in that year gave the military $4 billion for Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected trucks when the Pentagon asked for only $400 million, and in total spent $45 billion on the MRAP program.
The report notes that the Army has $25 billion in gear on the ground in Afghanistan and quotes Lt. Gen. Raymond Mason, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for logistics, as saying it would cost at most $14 billion to bring those goods home. Military leaders have said the cost of bringing all equipment home is too high, but Coburn argues otherwise.
Also in Coburn’s report were three community outreach efforts–$10 million from the Army National Guard to produce and air “Soldier of Steel” recruiting ads to coincide with this year’s Superman movie, “Man of Steel;” $29 million for National Guard sponsorship of a NASCAR team, which has cost taxpayers $136 million over the past five years; and $9 million the Army spent on 10 23-minute episodes of a documentary-style advertisement to boost recruiting.